Surgical Suites' Operations Management

Abstract

Surgical suites are a key driver of a hospital's costs, revenues, and utilization of postoperative resources such as beds. This article describes some commonly occurring operations management problems faced by the managers of surgical suites. For three of these problems, the article also provides preliminary models and possible solution approaches. Its goal is to identify open challenges to spur further research by the operations management community on an important class of problems that have not received adequate attention in the literature, despite their economic importance.

A stochastic dynamic program for the single-day surgery scheduling problem

“…For hospitals using block schedules, the literature on surgery scheduling describes the problem as consisting of three stages: (1) determining the amount of OR time to allocate to various surgical specialties, (2) creating a block schedule implementing the desired allocations, and (3) scheduling individual patients into available time (Blake & Donald, 2002;Santibañez, Begen, & Atkins, 2007;Testi, Tanfani, & Torre, 2007). First stage decisions typically reflect the long-term strategic goals of hospital management, such as meeting the demand for surgical specialties' services, achieving desired levels of patient throughput, or maximizing revenue (Blake & Carter, 2002;Gupta, 2007;Santibañez et al, 2007;Testi et al,2007). The second and third stages represent medium-and short-term operational decisions, respectively, but differ markedly in their objectives.…”

Models, algorithms and performance analysis for adaptive operating room scheduling

“…OR planning and scheduling have also received considerable attention in scientific literature, as demonstrated by the review of Cardoen, Demeulemeester, and Beliën (2010), which has identified 246 publications, among which 114 in the first decade of the present millennium. Other comprehensive reviews which address OR scheduling are provided by Erdogan et al (2011), Gupta (2007), Gupta and Denton (2008) and Cayirli and Veral (2003).…”

Analysing the complexity of the model-based decision making processes within the industrial management context

“…Since the surgeon is a very expensive resource, decreasing the surgeon's waiting time has been the subject of many papers , Denton and Gupta, 2003, Gupta, 2007, and Lebowitz, 2003. This factor has to take into consideration the minimum waiting time a surgeon needs between operations (Pause Time).…”

“…Late starts result in direct costs associated with overtime staffing when the surgery finishes later than the end of the appropriate shift (Kharraja et al, 2006. Gupta, 2007, Fei et al, 2008and Adan and Visser 2002.…”

“…Most studies (Fei et al, 2009and Gupta, 2007 on this topic make the assumption that the surgeons for each patient are already known. However, the problem of assigning surgeons, residents for each operation in several ORs, does not appear to have been addressed in OR planning and scheduling (Ghazalbash et al, 2012).…”