Operations Research for Health Care in Red Zone

The book contains selected contributions from the 48th Annual Meeting of the EURO Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services (ORAHS 2022) held in Bergamo, Italy, July 2022.

ORAHS 2022 provided a network for researchers involved in the application of systematic and quantitative analyses to support planning and management in the health services sector, with the ultimate goal of pursuing good health and well-being.

It was the ORAHS in the red zone, focused on the organization and reaction of health systems in the face of emergency situations such as the COVID pandemic.

The questions addressed were, for example, how can hospitals and public authorities react to extreme scenarios by reorganizing their resources? How and to what extent do local health systems integrate hospitals to deal with a pandemic? How can Decision Support Systems for diagnosis and treatment help when battling a new virus for the first time?

Contributions included a variety of methodological viewpoints (optimization, simulation, data analysis, predictive models, decision science, mathematical programming, machine learning, ...) and health services applications (hospital management, therapy calibration, analysis of statistical and epidemiological data, minimization of logistics costs, ...).

This work strongly contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Programme.