An Innovative Concept for Teaching Operations Research Applied to Health Care

This chapter presents our innovative approach to teach Industrial Engineering and Management Master students how to apply Operations Research to health care problems. We, the Chair of Discrete Optimization and Logistics (DOL) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, offer the course “Operations Research in Health Care Management” where we give an introduction to the German health care system and cover a variety of Operations Research (OR) methods and their application to health care planning problems arising for example in hospitals, emergency medical services systems or for home health care providers. In our practical seminar “Health Care Management” students work in groups to solve real world problems from hospitals or other health care facilities using OR methods. During their project, they work in close collaboration with representatives from the project partners and are supervised by DOL research assistants. Additionally, students can deepen their skills in software tools by attending lectures on the IBM ILOG Optimization studio or on the simulation software AnyLogic. These skills are especially useful for our practical seminar. Finally, the seminar “Hospital Management” taught by a former hospital director gives additional insight into the hospital processes as well as regulations and best practices. The courses are supposed to increase the students’ interest in working in the health care domain. Our aim is to prepare motivated students for management positions in hospitals or other health care institutions.