In hospitals, the operating room (OR) is a particularly expensive facility and thus efficient scheduling is imperative. This can be greatly supported by using advanced methods that are discussed in the academic literature. In order to help researchers and practitioners to select new relevant articles, we classify the recent OR planning and scheduling literature into tables using patient type, used performance measures, decisions made, OR supporting units, uncertainty, research methodology and testing phase. Additionally, we identify promising practices and trends and recognize common pitfalls when researching OR scheduling. Our findings indicate, among others, that it is often unclear whether an article mainly targets researchers and thus contributes advanced methods or targets practitioners and consequently provides managerial insights. Moreover, many performance measures (e.g., overtime) are not always used in the correct context. Furthermore, we see that important information that would allow readers to determine whether the reported research results are relevant to them is often missing. In order to avoid these pitfalls, we conclude that researchers need to state whether they target researchers or practitioners, motivate the choice of the used performance measures and mention both setting and method specific assumptions.

In many hospitals there are patients who receive surgery later than what is medically indicated. In one of Europe's largest hospitals, the University Hospital Leuven, this is the case for approximately every third patient. Serving patients late cannot always be avoided as a highly utilized OR department will sometimes suffer capacity shortage, occasionally leading to unavoidable delays in patient care. Nevertheless, serving patients late is a problem as it exposes them to an increased health risk and hence should be avoided whenever possible.In order to improve the current situation, the delay in patient scheduling had to be quantified and the responsible mechanism, the scheduling process, had to be better understood. Drawing from this understanding, we implemented and tested realistic patient scheduling methods in a discrete event simulation model.We found that it is important to model non-elective arrivals and to include elective rescheduling decisions made on surgery day itself. Rescheduling ensures that OR related performance measures, such as overtime, will only loosely depend on the chosen patient scheduling method.We also found that capacity considerations should guide actions performed before the surgery day such as patient scheduling and patient replanning. This is the case as those scheduling strategies that ensure that

No abstract

In hospitals, the operating room (OR) is a particularly expensive facility and thus efficient scheduling is imperative. This can be greatly supported by using advanced methods that are discussed in the academic literature. In order to help researchers and practitioners to select new relevant articles, we classify the recent OR planning and scheduling literature into tables using patient type, used performance measures, decisions made, OR supporting units, uncertainty, research methodology and testing phase. Additionally, we identify promising practices and trends and recognize common pitfalls when researching OR scheduling. Our findings indicate, among others, that it is often unclear whether an article mainly targets researchers and thus contributes advanced methods or targets practitioners and consequently provides managerial insights. Moreover, many performance measures (e.g., overtime) are not always used in the correct context. Furthermore, we see that important information that would allow readers to determine whether the reported research results are relevant to them is often missing. In order to avoid these pitfalls, we conclude that researchers need to state whether they target researchers or practitioners, motivate the choice of the used performance measures and mention both setting and method specific assumptions.

In many hospitals there are patients who receive surgery later than what is medically indicated. In one of Europe's largest hospitals, the University Hospital Leuven, this is the case for approximately every third patient. Serving patients late cannot always be avoided as a highly utilized OR department will sometimes suffer capacity shortage, occasionally leading to unavoidable delays in patient care. Nevertheless, serving patients late is a problem as it exposes them to an increased health risk and hence should be avoided whenever possible.In order to improve the current situation, the delay in patient scheduling had to be quantified and the responsible mechanism, the scheduling process, had to be better understood. Drawing from this understanding, we implemented and tested realistic patient scheduling methods in a discrete event simulation model.We found that it is important to model non-elective arrivals and to include elective rescheduling decisions made on surgery day itself. Rescheduling ensures that OR related performance measures, such as overtime, will only loosely depend on the chosen patient scheduling method.We also found that capacity considerations should guide actions performed before the surgery day such as patient scheduling and patient replanning. This is the case as those scheduling strategies that ensure that