On the use of partitioning for scheduling of surgeries in the inpatient surgical department

Lien Wang (), Erik Demeulemeester, Nancy Vansteenkiste and Frank E. Rademakers
Additional contact information
Lien Wang: KU Leuven, Faculty of Business and Economics, Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Research Centre for Operations Management
Erik Demeulemeester: KU Leuven, Faculty of Business and Economics, Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Research Centre for Operations Management
Nancy Vansteenkiste: University Hospitals Leuven, Faculty of Medicine
Frank E. Rademakers: University Hospitals Leuven, Faculty of Medicine

Health Care Management Science, 2022, vol. 25, issue 4, No 2, 526-550

Abstract: Abstract In hospitals, the efficient planning of the operating rooms (ORs) is difficult due to the uncertainty inherent to surgical services. This is especially true for the inpatient surgical department where complex and long surgeries are often performed along with surgeries on emergency patients. This paper aims to improve the scheduling of the inpatient department by partitioning the elective surgeries into the more predictable surgeries (MPS) group and the less predictable surgeries (LPS) group, based on surgery duration variability, and by scheduling each of the two surgery groups in different ORs. Through a simulation study that comprehensively investigates the impact of the partitioning on different performance measures under various environmental settings, we report important findings and insights. First, partitioning can effectively shorten the waiting times of elective patients for both MPS and LPS groups, but the option should be allowed to reassign patients from the MPS or LPS ORs to the other ORs when needed. Meanwhile, partitioning sometimes slightly increases the elective cancellation rate. Second, the ability to use the available capacity of the ORs as much as possible is key to reducing elective waiting times. Third, partitioning might slightly worsen the waiting times of emergency patients, while the slightly negative impact on emergency patients decreases when the number of ORs is higher. Fourth, the beneficial impact of partitioning on elective patients increases with an increased patient demand. Last, for the settings considered in this study there was no benefit in partitioning the elective patients into more than two groups.

Keywords: Operating room scheduling; Inpatient surgical department; Dynamic surgery scheduling; Surgery partitioning; Discrete-event simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10729-022-09598-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:hcarem:v:25:y:2022:i:4:d:10.1007_s10729-022-09598-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10729

DOI: 10.1007/s10729-022-09598-0

Access Statistics for this article

Health Care Management Science is currently edited by Yasar Ozcan

More articles in Health Care Management Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().