Health care operations management

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Health care operations management has become a major topic for health care service providers and society.Operations research already has and further will make considerable contributions for the effective and efficient delivery of health care services.This special issue collects seven carefully selected papers dealing with optimization and decision analysis problems in the field of health care operations management.The papers cover a considerable range of health care problems including location planning for hospital and health services (Mestre et al., Zhang et al.), organization of hospital resources (Vanberkel et al., Hulshof et al.), surgery scheduling (Marques et al., Herring and Herrmann) and treatment scheduling (Schimmelpfeng et al.).These problems are addressed within a number of different health care environments such as hospitals, preventive care, outpatient clinics and rehabilitation hospitals.The operations research techniques which are employed are mixed-integer linear programming, stochastic dynamic programming, hierarchical decomposition, queueing theory, simulation and choice models.The special issue thus covers a broad range of problems, environments and techniques.It is noteworthy that all papers are either treating a real life problem or are inspired by the latter, which demonstrates the problem-driven