Managing urgent care in hospitals

Robust Surgery Scheduling: A Model-Based Overview

“…The main decision is how non-elective surgeries are accommodated. We distinguish three possible policies [2,23]: (1) a dedicated policy, where there are one or more dedicated ORs for non-elective patients; (2) a flexible policy, where slack capacity is fragmented and added to each of the regular ORs, and non-electives are then fitted into the elective schedule; and (3) a hybrid policy, where policies (1) and ( 2) are combined.…”

“…Van Veen-Berkx et al [24] find that the flexible policy is optimal by simulation while after implementation the opposite was the case. Borgman [2] carries out a simulation study in which he tests the different policies for many different hospital characteristics. His main conclusion is that the dedicated policy works best for small hospitals with at most eight ORs and that the flexible policy is best for larger hospitals.…”

“…Suppose that the expected number of emergency surgeries of specialty z is n el z at an arbitrary OR-day, each having a mean duration μ el z and standard deviation σ el z . The expected duration of the elective surgeries in this block is therefore n el z μ el z with a standard deviation of n el z (σ el z ) 2 . The total required capacity to perform all the expected non-elective surgeries of specialty z is…”

“…where n em z is the number of expected emergency surgeries of specialty z with expected duration μ em z and variance (σ em z ) 2 . So for each specialty z there are n el z μ s time units of planned capacity, and additionally an amount of δ z (p z ) of slack capacity is added to the schedule.…”

Smarter imaging management: operations management for radiology

“…Table 1 (page 26) shows to which extent these new reviews match our inclusion criteria. 66 searched in Chapter 2 of his Ph.D. dissertation for papers that use OR/MS methods to model and quantitatively assess patient related processes that take place within a hospital setting. Just like our study, he mainly focused on individual departments, but he limited his search to nonelective departments.…”