ORAHS 2013

INVITATION

The rate of change in Health Care delivery is increasing.  The old forces of change (technology, costs, quality and demographics) are causing continually increasing pressure and change. And new forces (empowered health care consumer, health care big data explosion, life sciences knowledge explosion, demand for value by payers and patients and a rapidly growing middle class in the major markets of the newly developed and emerging countries of the world) are accelerating the very nature of what, how, where and when health care is delivered.

These changes present great opportunities and challenges for Operations Research.  They mean that most of the traditional OR solutions for scheduling, planning, networks, supply chains, forecasting must be changed and restudied now due to new objectives, constraints, system changes, interactions and problem sizes. But perhaps the greatest challenges for us come from the new powerful forces emerging over the past few years.  Not only do we have to attack the new problems they open up but we have to learn new paradigms, knowledge bases and languages just to understand these problems and create new OR knowledge to solve them.  Our curricula, joint education and research programs, student and faculty selection will undergo stressful scrutiny and change.

I will discuss these forces in brief and spend more time on what are the implications for research and education facing health care delivery and systems/operations research/management sciences.