Health is one of the most important factors for the prosperity and well-being of a society.

In recent years, this system is challenged by demographic changes: the elderly population

(age 65 and older) will increase, which will result in a higher demand for health care services.

Simultaneously the decrease in the fertility rate results in a shrinking number of trained

medical staff. In order to keep the high standard of the German health care system,

it is crucial to improve on the efficient and effective use of our resources.

Planning and organization in these fields are complicated by the uncertain nature of health care processes,

e.g., the fluctuating demand, arrival time of patients, emergency patients, durations of a single

treatment, length of stay or resource failures. These uncertainties are rarely incorporated in the

optimization process, if optimization and mathematical methods are used at all. In this talk,

I will present, how we approach such kind of optimization problems and show examples how

robust optimization can be used to integrated these uncertainties into the optimization process.