Abstract
The scheduling of surgical interventions directly impacts the number of patients that can be treated with given operating room resources. Medical centres often do not respond satisfactorily to the demand for interventions, and the shortcomings of traditional manual scheduling approaches contribute to the growth of waiting lists. In addition to the timetabling aspect, operating room scheduling methods must determine the order in which patients should be treated as a function of their relative priorities. This paper develops and compares two optimization models and two algorithms for scheduling interventions over a defined period that satisfy patient priority criteria. The four mathematical methods were studied under a range of different scenarios using real data from a public hospital in Chile. Improvements in operating room utilization rates using the proposed formulations ranged from 10 to 15 % over the current manual techniques, but the choice of method in any given real application will depend on the scenarios likely to be encountered.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Oscar Barros for providing the inspiration to study the operating room scheduling problem, and Daniel Espinoza and Kenneth Rivkin for their interesting suggestions. They are also grateful to the medical and administrative staff at Luis Calvo Mackenna Hospital for their collaboration. The first author was partly financed by UBACyT Grant No. 20020130100808BA (Argentina), ANPCyT PICT Grant No. 2012-1324 (Argentina) and FONDECyT Grant No. 1140787 (Chile) as well as by the Institute Complex Engineering Systems Institute (Chile).
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Durán, G., Rey, P.A. & Wolff, P. Solving the operating room scheduling problem with prioritized lists of patients. Ann Oper Res 258, 395–414 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-016-2172-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-016-2172-x