title: Improving operating room schedules.
abstract: Operating rooms (ORs) in US hospitals are costly to staff, generate about 70 % of a hospital's revenues, and operate at a staffed-capacity utilization of 60-70 %. Many hospitals allocate blocks of OR time to individual or groups of surgeons as guaranteed allocation, who book surgeries one at a time in their blocks. The booking procedure frequently results in unused time between surgeries. Realizing that this presents an opportunity to improve OR utilization, hospitals manually reschedule surgery start times one or two days before each day of surgical operations. The purpose of rescheduling is to decrease OR staffing costs, which are determined by the number of concurrently staffed ORs. We formulate the rescheduling problem as a variant of the bin-packing problem with interrelated items, which are the surgeries performed by the same surgeon. We develop a lower bound (LB) construction algorithm and prove that the LB is at least (2/3) of the optimal staffing cost. A key feature of our approach is that we allow hospitals to have two shift lengths. Our analytical results form the basis of a branch-and-bound algorithm, which we test on data obtained from three hospitals. Experiments show that rescheduling saves significant staffing costs.
authors: Industrial & Systems Engineering Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
authors: Fei
authors: F
authors: Li
authors: Industrial & Systems Engineering Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA. guptad@me.umn.edu.
authors: Diwakar
authors: D
authors: Gupta
authors: University of Minnesota School of Public Health, 420 Delaware Street SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA.
authors: Sandra
authors: S
authors: Potthoff
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001071:Appointments and Schedules; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D006739:Hospital Administration; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009873:Operating Rooms / Q000458:organization & administration*; D010561:Personnel Staffing and Scheduling / Q000458:organization & administration*; D013997:Time Factors; D014481:United States
keywords: Health care operations management; Math programming; Operating rooms; Surgery scheduling