Efficient scheduling of emergency surgeries by adjusting the schedule of elective surgeries

Abstract

The rapid growth of the population has resulted in an increasing demand for healthcare services, which forces managers to use costly resources such as operating rooms effectively. The surgery-scheduling problem is a general title for problems that consists of the patient selection and sequencing of the surgeries at the operational level, setting their start times, and assigning the resources. Hospital managers usually encounter elective surgeries that can be delayed slightly and emergency surgeries whose arrivals are unexpected, and most of them need quick access to operating rooms. Reserving operating room capacity for handling incoming emergency surgeries is expensive.Moreover, emergency surgeries cannot afford long waiting times. This paper deals with the problem of surgery scheduling in the presence of emergency surgeries with a focus on balancing the efficient use of operating room capacity and responsiveness to emergency surgeries. We proposed a new algorithm for surgery scheduling with a specific operating room capacity planning and analyzed it through a simulation method based on real data. This algorithm respects working hours and availability of staff and other resources in a surgical suite.

Optimizing a multi-objective master surgical scheduling under probabilistic length of stay and demand uncertainty

“…Constraint (6) calculates the overtime of the OR. Constraint (7) calculates the idle time of the OR. Constraint (8) indicates the surgeon's preferences in the assigned blocks to him/her.…”

“…In a weekly planning horizon, the MSS problem assigns surgeons to a particular OR time block, day, and room [6]. In operational planning, the decisions are made for daily and weekly periods [7]. The scheduling procedure for the surgical department in nearly all hospitals has two principal steps.…”

Course timetabling in medical universities given physicians' educational and clinical tasks

“…By comparing the Pareto frontiers in Figure (5) for these two scenarios to the original scenario, it is concluded that decreasing the difference in preference coefficients for academic degrees results in an increase in the amount of preferences satisfied.…”

“…Scheduling has been researched and studied for many years as one of the well-known combinatorial optimization problems. Numerous studies have been conducted in this field of optimization in a variety of fields, including manufacturing [1], transportation [2,3], healthcare [4,5], sports [6], and education [7]. [8].…”