The Health and Care Operational Research Network (‘HaCORN’ -pronounced hay-corn) brings together researchers and practitioners across UK health and care organisations. It provides a forum to share expertise and enhance the application of operational research and data science within services.
The network has a membership from over fifty organisations. It meets online monthly and provides networking opportunities, guest speakers and training resources. Its primary focus is on application providing an important channel by which the real world challenges of health and care delivery can be directly addressed by the research community.
Origin
HaCORN was established during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and was initially badged as the National COVID-19 Operational Research Network (N-CORN). During this early period researchers met remotely to share research and collaborate to address the urgent challenges presented by Covid. The network flourished, developing a bank of knowledge and experience, fuelling a collaborative analytical community making effective use of their skills to address key issues in a timely manner. Latterly, the scope of the network has become more generally applied to wider areas of concern across health and care delivery and this precipitated its renaming to HaCORN.
Impact
The network has resulted in – and contributed to – a wide range of work including:
- Forecasting of likely demand for frontline NHS services
- Epidemiological modelling to understand the spread of COVID-19
- Demand and capacity analysis for COVID-19 for NHS England
- Modelling to inform ‘end of life’ care management
- Computer simulation to support the organisation and delivery of the COVID-19 vaccination programme
Subgroups
HaCORN has a number of subgroups looking at specific modelling and data science methodologies and areas of interest. If you’re interested in joining a subgroup, please contact the group lead.
Artificial Intelligence (HealthCAI)
Lead: Adele Marshall (a.h.marshall@qub.ac.uk)
The HealthCAI subgroup is for those who have a shared interest in utilizing the benefits of recent developments in Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning and AI to have workable solutions embedded in the healthcare domain. It brings together healthcare practitioners, academics and technology experts in a forum for sharing experience, collaboration and new opportunities.
Cluster Analysis
Lead: Sanja Petrovic (sanja.petrovic@nottingham.ac.uk)
This subgroup aims to link with healthcare managers and clinicians to investigate the advancements that can be achieved using clustering in the problems they face, to disseminate their results via both healthcare practitioners’, academic channels and HaCORN meetings, and to carry out research in topography of clustering in healthcare.
Mental Health
Lead: Martin Pitt (m.pitt@exeter.ac.uk)
This group is focussed on the specific challenges of mental healthcare for the application of data science and OR methods. The subgroup draws on the experience of NHS mental healthcare staff (analysts and clinicians) together with researchers in the field to define the key issues and explore relevant research priorities and opportunities in this context.
System Dynamics
Lead: Aaron Bhavsar (aaron.bhavsar@thewholesystem.co.uk)
System Dynamics is a highly accessible area of simulation and modelling that has a significant contribution to make to Health & Care OR approaches. This sub-group is designed to explore, share and encourage the use of systems thinking and system dynamics modelling as relevant to system leaders, modellers and data scientists.
Health Economics
Lead: Armando Vargas-Palacios (a.vargas-palacios@leeds.ac.uk)
The group aims to connect health economics and operational research to better understand how these two disciplines can be combined to facilitate and advance future research. It brings together health economists and operational research specialists to explore and facilitate the use of combined methods, and provide a network of advice, support, and knowledge sharing between the two fields.
Joining HaCORN
HaCORN is open to all analysts and researchers with experience or an interest in the application of operational research skills to address key issues facing health and social care. This includes analysts working in health and care organisations as well as the research and academic community. Meetings currently take place monthly (usually 10-11am on the last Friday of each calendar month) and are held online. In addition to networking opportunities, meetings also include guest speakers and feature learning opportunities.
To find out more and to join a HaCORN meeting, please contact us at: penchord@exeter.ac.uk
Resources
If you are a member of HaCORN you can access the Teams site here: Teams Site.
If you would like access to HaCORN resources and presentations, please email penchord@exeter.ac.uk