Predicting Case Volume from the Accumulating Elective Operating Room Schedule Facilitates Staffing Improvements

Abstract

The developing elective schedule predicts final case volume weeks in advance. After implementation, overly high- or low-volume days are revealed in advance, allowing nursing, ancillary service, and anesthesia managers to proactively fine-tune staffing up or down to match demand.

Staff Planning for Hospitals with Cost Estimation and Optimization

“…In practice, reduction in the variability B st would just require additional information to better forecast demand a month in advance. Some of the ways the UCLA RRMC can potentially do this include incorporating early booking information when deciding the monthly staff planning (Tiwari et al 2014) and using pre-operative consultations, text, and phone…”

Data, Data, On the Server

“…This is illustrated well in the article when the model predicted an abnormally low volume without historical precedence. 1 The authors investigated and discovered many surgeons planned to attend a national meeting but had not informed the schedulers.…”

“…should a hospital or anesthesia department wish to begin doing such work themselves options exist across the cost spectrum. These options include using the open-source analytics package R* or IBM's SPSS (IBM Corp., New York, NY) as was done by tiwari et al 1 Alternatively, an engineer can be hired to do the programming required or outside consultants with expertise in OR management can be brought in. When the implementation of statistical methods is adequately described, as tiwari et al have done here, a group's locally acquired data can be tested against a new method to see whether similar results might be obtained.…”

“…Doing so causes the management team to be less likely to fall into the trap of imposing causality where none exists just to increase the impression of understanding. tiwari et al 1 succeeded on these two points. They disclose a variety of analytic methods examined in addition to the implemented technique and their data come from two separate locations across all posted cases.…”

“…In this issue of AnesthesIOlOgy, an excellent study from Vanderbilt University adds to this literature by examining statistical methods to predict future OR demand. 1 This was done by examining the OR schedule, as case bookings accumulate weeks before the day of surgery, to predict how busy a given day in the future will be. Their work is also laudable because they implemented in their hospital what they found in their study.…”