Mini EURO Conference on Improving Healthcare: new challenges, new approaches

Abstract

The XXXI Euro Mini Conference on Improving Healthcare: new challenges, new approaches took place in Coimbra, Portugal, from the 30th March to the 1st April 2015. This volume contains 17 contributed papers, presented during the Conference.Recent advances in medicine allow us to live longer and healthier lives. These advances have been made possible through the joint contribution of very different scientific fields. Healthcare is nowadays better understood as a multidisciplinary field, with increasing number of challenges that can be better tackled by joint collaboration of researchers with different scientific backgrounds.The challenges that Healthcare is facing have not only to do with the ability of providing better services to all (treatments, preventive medicine, better diagnosis tools), with an increased focus on improved personalized treatment options, but also with the need to tackle an increased pressure felt by Healthcare systems: increased number of patients, some of them requiring expensive treatments, with a consequent increase in the workload for health institutions that most of the times have to deal with important budget restrictions. The Conference provided a forum in which researchers coming from different scientific disciplines discussed and shared their experience regarding methodological approaches to tackle different healthcare challenges. The Conference welcomed contributions from operational research, industrial engineering, medicine, medical physics, management, computational biology, bioinformatics and health economics, among others.The Conference had 93 enrolled participants, from 22 different nationalities: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States of America. These participants had very different academic backgrounds: operations research, medicine, medical physics, engineering, biomedicine, medicine, among others. Moreover, participants had also very different professional backgrounds: researchers from academia, researchers from private companies, clinicians, etc. This diversity contributed to the fulfillment of the Conference objectives. Among these participants there were 20 PhD students presenting their research work, many of them for the first time. The Conference Program was composed by a total of 70 talks, 4 of which invited talks. Our invited speakers were Alexandre Quintanilha, Ben Heijmen, David Craft and Sally Braislford.The conference was supported by EURO (the Association of European Operational Research Societies), ORAHS (EURO Working Group on Operational Research Applied to Health Services), APDIO (Portuguese Operational Research Society), Inesc-Coimbra, Faculty of Economics of University of Coimbra, FCT (Portuguese Science Foundation) and COMPETE under project grant PTDC/EIA-CCO/121450/2010.