Planning and scheduling of semi-urgent surgeries.
This paper investigates the trade-off between cancellations of elective surgeries due to semi-urgent surgeries, and unused operating room (OR) time due to excessive reservation of OR time for semi-urgent surgeries. Semi-urgent surgeries, to be performed soon but not necessarily today, pose an uncertain demand on available hospital resources, and interfere with the planning of elective patients. For a highly utilized OR, reservation of OR time for semi-urgent surgeries avoids excessive cancellations of elective surgeries, but may also result in unused OR time, since arrivals of semi-urgent patients are unpredictable. First, using a queuing theory framework, we evaluate the OR capacity needed to accommodate every incoming semi-urgent surgery. Second, we introduce another queuing model that enables a trade-off between the cancelation rate of elective surgeries and unused OR time. Third, based on Markov decision theory, we develop a decision support tool that assists the scheduling process of elective and semi-urgent surgeries. We demonstrate our results with actual data obtained from a department of neurosurgery.
Zonderland
Maartje E
ME
Division I, Leiden University Medical Center, Postbox 9600, 2300 RC Leiden, The Netherlands. m.e.zonderland@lumc.nl
Boucherie
Richard J
RJ
Litvak
Nelly
N
Vleggeert-Lankamp
Carmen L A M
CL
D006801:Humans; D008390:Markov Chains; D009873:Operating Rooms; D010360:Patient Transfer / Q000458:organization & administration*; D014218:Triage