Integrated Block Sharing: A Win-Win Strategy for Hospitals and Surgeons

Robert Day (), Robert Garfinkel () and Steven Thompson ()
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Robert Day: Operations and Information Management, School of Business, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269
Robert Garfinkel: Operations and Information Management, School of Business, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269
Steven Thompson: Management Department, Robins School of Business, University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia 23173

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2012, vol. 14, issue 4, 567-583

Abstract: We consider the problem of balancing two competing objectives in the pursuit of efficient management of operating rooms in a hospital: providing surgeons with predictable, reliable access to the operating room and maintaining high utilization of capacity. The common solution to the first problem (in practice) is to grant exclusive "block time," in which a portion of the week in an operating room is designated to a particular surgeon, barring other surgeons from using this room/time. As a major improvement over this existing approach, we model the possibility of "shared" block time, which need only satisfy capacity constraints in expectation. We reduce the computational difficulty of the resulting NP-hard block-scheduling problem by implementing a column-generation approach and demonstrate the efficacy of this technique using simulation, calibrated to a real hospital's historical data and objectives.Our simulations illustrate substantial benefits to hospitals under a variety of circumstances and demonstrate the advantages of our new approach relative to a benchmark method taken from the recent literature.

Keywords: healthcare management; math programming; production planning and scheduling; service operations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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