Working
together

Paul Gemmel is professor of Service and Healthcare Management at the Faculty of Economics and Business administration of the Ghent University and Senior Research Fellow at the Vlerick Business School, both located in Belgium. He is head of the department Marketing, Innovation and Organisation of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, and associated member of department of Public Health and Primary Care of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, both at the Ghent University. He is the program director of the Master of Science in Management and Policy of Healthcare at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.

He is co-founder of the Center of Service Intelligence (CSI) and the Health Care Management Research Center, both of the Ghent University, and of the MINOZ research center for Hospital Management at the Vlerick Business School.

He studied one year at the Business College of the Arizona State University (US) (1992) and did research sabbaticals at the Tilburg University (The Netherlands, 2014 ), CTF service research center at Karlstad University (2016) and the HEC Montreal (Canada, 2014 and 2016).

In his research, he combines service management and operations management to better understand the relationship between the design of the service delivery system and the customer experience, more particularly in healthcare. He supervised and is supervising several PhDs financed in different ways. He did several projects with service managers in banking, facility service, manufacturing, healthcare and public firms. He participates in innovation projects such as the use of RFID in healthcare processes and in healthcare management projects for the Flemish and Federal Government.

He has published in business and management journals. He is co-editor of and co-author of different chapters in several books such as ‘Service Management voor Zorgorganisaties’ (Die Keure) and Strategisch Management voor Gezondheids- en Welzijnsorganisaties (Lannoo Campus).

Melissa De Regge obtained the degree of Master of Science in Healthcare Management and Policy at Ghent University in 2010 and the degree of Doctor in Applied Economics in April 2015. Melissa has experience in the working field, as she has worked for 13 years as a nurse. Currently she works at the Strategic Policy Cell of Ghent University Hospital and as a visiting professor at Ghent University. Her key interests include management and operational aspects of health care delivery and health care governance—two domains in which she has published several peer-reviewed articles. She is involved in several research projects for health care optimization.

She is a member of The Center for Service Intelligence (CSI) and the Healthcare Management Research Center (CURAMA), two interdisciplinary research centers at Ghent University that focus on research topics in the domain of service management and health care management. She also teaches qualitative research methods and management at Ghent University.

Mark Leys graduated as a sociologist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, followed by a PhD in Health Sciences at the same university. He has since been working at Open University of the Netherlands, Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam and the Federal Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE, Brussels). He currently holds the position of Professor and Head of the Organization Policy and Inequalities in Health (OPIH) research group at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

He has extensive expertise in health systems, health services research and evaluation research. He is currently running a number of evaluation projects on innovations in health care, particularly in the fields of mental health care, chronic care and elderly care. He is actively involved in research on, and the promotion of, knowledge transfer and knowledge brokering to bridge the gap between research and policymaking. He is also Program Director of the Master of Science in Healthcare Management and Policy at the VUB.

Melissa Horlait is a clinical psychologist by training. She started her professional career at the oncology and palliative care department of the Sint Maria Hospital in Halle, Belgium. After been doing this for five years, she started her PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. In 2017 she obtained her PhD in Social Health Sciences.

Today, she’s a Professor at the OPIH research group where she coordinates all kind of research projects focusing on improving communication and interprofessional collaboration skills in healthcare, which inherently places a strong emphasis on promoting evidence-based, patient-centred (educational) interventions. She also teaches qualitative research methods and literature review methods for the Master of Science in Healthcare Management and Policy at the Faculty of Farmacy and Medicine of the VUB.