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Operating room scheduling for non-operating room anesthesia with emergency uncertainty

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Abstract

How to improve the efficiency of operating rooms (ORs) has always been a challenging problem in the context of healthcare operations management. This paper focuses on the research of operating room scheduling under non-operating room anesthesia (NORA) mechanism, in the presence of the uncertainty of emergency arrivals. In particular, we examine the advantages of the NORA mechanism in comparison with traditional surgical anesthesia practice under different operating room settings. Operationally, the process is comprised of two stages: (1) initial scheduling and (2) rescheduling. In the first stage, the initial schedule for elective surgeries under NORA is first performed through our developed model. With experiments, it is shown that for different operating room settings, the NORA mechanism can significantly improve the operating room utilization in comparison with the traditional OR anesthesia process. In the second stage of rescheduling, our experiment results show that the rescheduling model can effectively address the disruptions caused by the random arrival of emergency patients.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71672019, 72073018, 71903020), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (DUT21RW406, DUT19RW212), the Key Project of Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of China (20&ZD129), the Major Projects of Social Science Planning Foundation of Liaoning Province (L21ZD006). The fourth author is supported in part by the Leir Research Institute (LRI), the Hurlburt Chair and Leir Chair Endowments at NJIT, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) grant (Award No. AM21TMATRD00C003 and Agreement No. 22-TMTSD-NJ-0003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116024, China

    Jian-Jun Wang, Zongli Dai & Wenxuan Zhang

  2. Martin Tuchman School of Management, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, 07102, USA

    Jim Junmin Shi

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  1. Jian-Jun Wang
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  2. Zongli Dai
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J-JW: Conceptualization, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Writing—review and editing. ZD: Investigation, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing—original draft. WZ: Investigation, Methodology, Software, Computation, Writing—original draft. JS: Methodology, Supervision, Managerial Insights, Paper Structuring, Writing—review and editing.

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Correspondence to Jim Junmin Shi.

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Wang, JJ., Dai, Z., Zhang, W. et al. Operating room scheduling for non-operating room anesthesia with emergency uncertainty. Ann Oper Res 321, 565–588 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-022-04870-6

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