Due time driven surgery scheduling

Michael Samudra, Erik Demeulemeester, Brecht Cardoen, Nancy Vansteenkiste and Frank Rademakers

No 509108, Working Papers of Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Leuven

Abstract: In many hospitals there are patients who re-ceive surgery later than what is medically indicated. In one of Europe’s largest hospitals, the University Hos-pital Leuven, this is the case for approximately every third patient. Serving patients late cannot always be avoided as a highly utilized OR department will some-times suffer capacity shortage, occasionally leading to unavoidable delays in patient care. Nevertheless, serv-ing patients late is a problem as it exposes them to an increased health risk and should be avoided whenever possible.In order to improve the current situation, the delay in patient scheduling had to be quantified and the re-sponsible mechanism, the scheduling process, had to be better understood. Drawing from this understanding, we implemented and tested realistic patient scheduling methods in a discrete event simulation model. We found that it is important to model non-elective arrivals and include elective rescheduling. Modeling rescheduling ensures that OR related performance mea-sures, such as overtime, will only loosely depend on the chosen patient scheduling method. We also found that capacity considerations should guide both patient scheduling and replanning related decision making. This is the case as those scheduling strategies that ensure that OR capacity is efficiently used will also result in a high number of patients served within their medically indicated time limit. An efficient use of OR capacity can be achieved, for instance, by serving patients first come, first served. As applying first come, first serve might not always be possible in a real setting, we found it is important to allow for patient replanning.

Keywords: Operating room planning; Patient scheduling; Due time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Published in FEB Research Report KBI_1523

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