Scheduling operating rooms: achievements, challenges and pitfalls

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.

Simulation-Based Rolling Horizon Scheduling for Operating Theatres

“…The problem of OT planning is a recurrent topic that has been covered by a substantial amount of papers. There exists several surveys on the subject of which some of the recent have been conducted by Cardoen et al [5], Guerriero and Guido [15], May et al [18], and lately Samudra et al [25] where 137 journal papers on the subject of OT planning were found in the period of 2004 to 2014.…”

“…Surprisingly, we only encountered two studies on the allocation of patients where stochastic future arrivals were accounted for [23,34]. However, Samudra et al [25] show that incorporating stochasticity constitutes more than half of the papers on OT planning.…”

Modeling the critical care pathway for cardiothoracic surgery

“…Samudra et al [10] reviewed many studies focused on theatre scheduling and the methodologies used. He came to the conclusion that a heuristic approach is often used whenever a problem is computationally difficult to solve within a reasonable time limit using mathematical programming.…”

Towards a systematic approach to resource optimization management in the healthcare domain

“…Patients can be divided in two large categories: elective patients and non-elective patients. Those patients for whom their procedure can be planned in advance form the elective class, whereas those for whom the procedure is unplanned or unexpected and requires an integration into the existing schedule belong to the non-elective class (Samudra et al, 2016). In turn, the elective class includes inpatients who are admitted to the hospital and outpatient patients who do not require hospital admission, whereas the non-elective class combines emergency patients, for whom procedure should be performed immediately, and urgent patients whose procedure can be postponed for a short time (Adan et al, 2011;Beliën et al, 2006;Ferrand et al, 2010).…”