Performance Analysis of the Operating Room Using Simulation

Abstract

The operating room (OR) is one of the most demanding departments in Winnipeg Health Science Center (WHSC). The problems faced to the OR are the long waiting list of patients and the inefficient utilization of human resources and facilities. The OR needs to treat a large variety of patient types versatility and dynamically. A discrete event simulation tool is used for modeling the OR operation. The major work involving in this research includes data collection, simulation modeling, model validation and output analysis. The initial results have shown the simulation potential in the performance improvement of healthcare systems

Operational research in the management of the operating theatre: a survey

“…A discrete event simulation was developed by Niu et al [124] to represent OR surgeries, in the Winnipeg Health Science Center. The main aim is to use simulation technology to identify the existing problems and bottlenecks in ORs, in order to improve the decision making process.…”

Operating room planning and scheduling: A literature review

“…Note that simulation is often preferred as the solution technique to study complex stochastic set- [3,5,6,9,10,17,20,25,26,27,28,41,43,44,49,54,60,62,63,64,70,75,76,78,79,82,83,84,86,88,92,94,97,104,109,110,111,112,113,114,115,120,122] other [20,35,37] tings, as it features an extensive modeling flexibility. Next to arrival and duration uncertainty, other types of uncertainty may be addressed.…”

“…Niu et al [88], for instance, describe a simulation model in which scenarios are tested with adapted resource capacities. In particular, they examine how the length of stay of patients varies according to changes in the number of operating rooms, chairs in the holding unit, beds in the PACU or transporters.…”

Modeling Human Motion for Predicting Usage of Hospital Operating Room

“…Other commercial solutions can be found such as OR-BIT (Lange et al, 2010) or AwareMedia (Bardram et al, 2006). More recently, in 2011, Niu et al (Niu et al, 2011) proposed a simulation model for performance analysis of the OR. Unfortunately, all these solutions rely on human intervention and manual data entry.…”