Bi‐Criteria Scheduling of Surgical Services for an Outpatient Procedure Center

Abstract

Uncertainty in the duration of surgical procedures can cause long patient wait times, poor utilization of resources, and high overtime costs. We compare several heuristics for scheduling an Outpatient Procedure Center. First, a discrete event simulation model is used to evaluate how 12 different sequencing and patient appointment time‐setting heuristics perform with respect to the competing criteria of expected patient waiting time and expected surgical suite overtime for a single day compared with current practice. Second, a bi‐criteria genetic algorithm (GA) is used to determine if better solutions can be obtained for this single day scheduling problem. Third, we investigate the efficacy of the bi‐criteria GA when surgeries are allowed to be moved to other days. We present numerical experiments based on real data from a large health care provider. Our analysis provides insight into the best scheduling heuristics, and the trade‐off between patient and health care provider‐based criteria. Finally, we summarize several important managerial insights based on our findings.

A Hybrid Heuristic Approach to Provider Selection and Task Allocation Problem in Telecommunications with Varying QoS Levels

“…As given in Gul et al 34 , using more computational effort with GA-based method under a restricted environment does not accomplish significant additional improvements. When we check number of resources used, GA1 uses 1-2 resources more than Heuristic A.…”

“…GA for the first time to the multi-stage hybrid flow job shop scheduling problem, and Gul et al 34 applies it to scheduling of surgical services.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…Factors to consider in the sequencing decision are doctor preference [224], medical or safety reasons [81,274], patient convenience [81,82], and resource restrictions [83]. Various rules for sequencing surgical cases are known [23,81,82,226,398,416,444]. In general, the traditional firstcome-first-serve (FCFS) rule is outperformed by a longest-processing-timefirst (LPTF) rule [49,300,302,387].…”

“…The planned start time of each surgical case is decided [226]. This provides a target time for planning the presurgical and postsurgical resources, and for planning the doctor schedules [511].…”

“…Methods: computer simulation [10,57,102,137,140,142,143,146,170,226,300,302,306,307,433,470,511], heuristics [10,13,83,131,136,175,177,225,226,256,306,308,341,416,422,455,486], Markov processes [196,228,365,381], mathematical programming [13,23,81,82,83,95,102,129,130,131,175,176,177,…”