Can statisticians beat surgeons at the planning of operations?

Paul Joustra, Reinier Meester and Hans Ophem ()

Empirical Economics, 2013, vol. 44, issue 3, 1697-1718

Abstract: The planning of operations in the Academic Medical Center is primarily based on the assessments of the length of the operation by the surgeons. We investigate whether duration models employing the information available at the moment the planning is made, offer a better alternative. Our empirical results indicate that statistical methods often do better than surgeons. This does not imply that the surgeons’ predictions do not contain valuable information. This information is a key explanatory variable in our statistical models. What our conclusion does entail is that a correction of the predictions of surgeons is possible because they are often under- or overestimating the actual length of operations. Copyright The Author(s) 2013

Keywords: Efficient planning of operations; Duration models; Cost reduction; I10; I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00181-012-0594-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:empeco:v:44:y:2013:i:3:p:1697-1718

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... rics/journal/181/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00181-012-0594-0

Access Statistics for this article

Empirical Economics is currently edited by Robert M. Kunst, Arthur H.O. van Soest, Bertrand Candelon, Subal C. Kumbhakar and Joakim Westerlund

More articles in Empirical Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().