HAS Online Seminar

Health Applications Society Online Seminar Series

Welcome to the HAS Online Seminar Series! This seminar series welcomes a broad range of healthcare modeling research topics such as healthcare operations, medical decision making, health policy, and health analytics. 

Next Speaker: Steve Chick is a Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD. He was named Academic Director of INSEAD's Healthcare Management Initiative and the Novartis Chair of Healthcare Management in 2008. He received his MS and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and his BS in Mathematics from Stanford University. Prior to joining INSEAD in 2001, he was a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s Industrial and Operations Engineering department and had worked for five years in the automotive and software industries. His research brings together operations management, simulation and statistical decision-making tools to help improve health care operations and new health technology assessment. He has held all elected officer positions of the INFORMS Simulation Society and has been active with editorial responsibilities, is a past president of the INFORMS Health Applications Society, and is an INFORMS Fellow.


Seminar Title: Effective Health Technologies Faster? Value-Based, Response Adaptive Learning in Clinical Trials


Date and Time: Friday, September 26th, at 1:00-2:00 PM EST

Abstract
: Clinical trials are used to evaluate the health benefit of new health technologies, such as pharmaceuticals, but are quite costly and therefore have been the subject of much study. Health technology adoption decisions are often made based on not only health benefit, but the costs of drugs and treatment processes. Is it possible that this mismatch between incentives at different steps of the health innovation pipeline, clinical effectiveness on the one hand and cost-effectiveness on the other, may lead to suboptimal decisions? We introduce and explore a stream of work that seeks to improve the allocation of resources to clinical trials in a way that balances health value for money for treatments that are ultimately approved. The stream uses work from Bayesian sequential optimal learning and from game theory. We first look at basic trade-offs in a fully sequential two-arm trial design, to balance the costs of collecting more trial data with the expected opportunity costs averted by making decisions with better information. We then explore three “RE”s motivated by trials in practice: RElevance to health system processes (e.g., clinical trials in public funded systems like the UK), REinforce the base model (with extensions to multi-arm trials and precision medicine), and REward (account for financial incentives like pricing and conditional approval in the drug development supply chain).

Registration Zoom Link HERE

Seminar List

Date

Speaker

Institution

Title

Recording

September 26, 2025

Stephen Chick

INSEAD

Effective Health Technologies Faster? Value-Based, Response Adaptive Learning in Clinical Trials

View Recording

September 5, 2025

Nan Liu

Boston College

Learning from Data and Practice: Playing Classics to Find New Tunes in Healthcare Scheduling

Recording coming soon

April 25, 2025

Dr. Timothy C. Y. Chan

 

University of Toronto

Optimizing the Deployment of Defibrillators

View Recording

February 28, 2025

Dr. Turgay Ayer

Georgia Tech

Perspectives on Practice-focused Healthcare Operations Research

View Recording

June 28, 2024

Dr. Ozlem Ergun

Northeastern University

Examining Resiliency in Pharmaceutical Drug Supply Chains Incorporating Stakeholder Behaviors

View Recording

May 26, 2023

Dr. Maria Mayorga

NC State University

An End-to-end Approach to Improving Population Health Outcomes in Diabetic Retinopathy Through Personalized Screening Strategies

View Recording

March 24, 2023

Dr. Pinar Keskinocak

Georgia Tech

Infectious Disease Modeling Evaluating Interventions and Resource Allocation

View Recording

February 24, 2023

Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal

Harvard Medical School

From Modeling to Health Policy: Increasing the Impact of OR/MS Work

View Recording

January 27, 2023

Dr. Hrayer Aprahamian

Texas A&M University

An Optimization Framework for Customized Targeted Mass Screening of Non-uniform Populations under the Availability of Multiple Schemes and Tests

View Recording

September 23, 2022

Dr. Stefan Scholtes

University of Cambridge

Some Thoughts on Causal Inference with Observational Data

View Recording

August 25, 2022

Dr. Rafael Araos

Universidad del Desarrollo in Santiago, Chile

Leveraging Population-Based Cohorts for Pandemic Response

Recording coming soon

July 22, 2022

Dr. Carri Chan

Columbia Business School

Interpretable Machine Learning for Resource Allocation with Application to Ventilator Triage

View Recording

June 24, 2022

Dr. Vishal Gupta

USC Marshall School of Business

Project Eva: Designing and Deploying the Greek COVID-19 Testing System

View Recording

May 27, 2022

Dr. Oguzhan Alagoz

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Stochastic Modeling to Personalize Cancer Screening

View Recording

April 22, 2022

Dr. Andrew Li

Carnegie Mellon University

Optimization in the Race to a Liquid Biopsy

View Recording

March 25, 2022

Dr. Dávid Papp

North Carolina State University

Optimization in radiotherapy: Quantifying the potential benefit of non-standard treatments

View Recording

February 25, 2022

Dr. Ebru Bish

The University of Alabama Culverhouse College of Business

Public Health Screening: Challenges and Opportunities for Operations Researchers

View Recording

January 28, 2022

Dr. John R. Birge

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Reflections on OR and Controlling a Pandemic

View Recording

September 24, 2021

Dr. Mark Van Oyen

University of Michigan

Patient Experience versus Efficiency and Methods for Optimization with Machine Learning in Healthcare

View Recording

August 27, 2021

Dr. Edward Kaplan

Yale University

COVID-19 Scratch Models to Support Local Decisions

View Recording

June 25, 2021

Dr. Alvin Roth

Stanford University

Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective

View Recording

    Infectious diseases continue to affect millions of people around the world every year, despite the progress in science and medicine. This presentation will provide an overview of our research team’s work on modeling various of infectious diseases, such as pandemic flu, cholera, malaria, polio, Guinea worm, and Covid-19. To understand the spread of infectious diseases and evaluate the impact of interventions, we utilized different modeling approaches, such as SEIR or agent-based, depending on the research questions or decision-support needs in practice. Our research results provide insights to decision-makers regarding the impact of combinations of interventions, considering factors such as compliance with public health recommendations, as well as the allocation of scare resources such as vaccines. 

    Seminar Organizers and Advisory Board

    The seminar organizers for 2025 are Gian-Gabriel Garcia and Melike Yildirim
    The advisory board of the Year 2022 includes Mark Van Oyen (University of Michigan), Maria Mayorga (North Carolina State University), and Timothy Chan (University of Toronto).

    Special thanks to INFORMS Health Applications Society and all board members for their enormous support!