Innovative operating room scheduling metric for creating surgical lists with desirable room utilisation rates

K. W. Soh (), C. Walker, M. O’Sullivan and J. Wallace
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K. W. Soh: University of Auckland
C. Walker: University of Auckland
M. O’Sullivan: University of Auckland
J. Wallace: North Shore Hospital

Operations Management Research, 2024, vol. 17, issue 2, No 8, 544-567

Abstract: Abstract One of the critical issues in healthcare management is the operating room (OR) scheduling problem. Solutions to this problem consider surgery durations and allocate elective surgeries to OR sessions in order to create surgical lists of high quality. Determining the quality of a surgical list is a key undertaking within OR scheduling and is the focus of this research. Currently, probability- and/or expectation-based measures of surgical lists are used instead of statistical distributions of surgery lists to measure quality. The use of multiple measures, e.g., a combination of expectation and probability to assess a surgical list, complicates OR scheduling, so we introduce a new single measure – the OR scheduling metric – for evaluating surgical lists before their realisations, i.e., for use within OR scheduling. We apply the OR scheduling metric to an actual elective dataset and use simulation to demonstrate its use, including customised scheduling rules. We recommend the adoption of a benchmarked OR scheduling metric by the elective surgical services in hospitals with expected practical benefits in the long run, i.e., simpler OR scheduling and more desirable room utilisation, to be similar to that observed in our simulations.

Keywords: Surgery scheduling; Surgical list; Utilisation rate; Performance measure; Benchmarking; Simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s12063-022-00313-4

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