Scheduling patients in an ambulatory surgical center

Abstract

This paper presents a deterministic approach to schedule patients in an ambulatory surgical center (ASC) such that the number of postanesthesia care unit nurses at the center is minimized. We formulate the patient scheduling problem as new variants of the no-wait, two-stage process shop scheduling problem and present computational complexity results for the new scheduling models. Also, we develop a tabu search-based heuristic algorithm to solve the patient scheduling problem. Our algorithm is shown to be very effective in finding near optimal schedules on a set of real data from a university hospital's ASC.

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

“…For example, without coordination with the ICU, a scheduled case may be rejected on its day of surgery due to a full ICU [398]. The contributions [13,81,102,177,256,337,366,398,433] do incorporate other care services, such as the patient wards and ICUs.…”

“…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,…”

“…An organization selects the particular services that the surgical care facility provides. The service mix stipulates which surgery types can be performed, and therefore impacts the net contribution of a facility [256]. Specific examples of services are medical devices to perform noninvasive surgeries and robotic services for assisting in specialized surgery [130].…”

“…Staff in surgical care services include surgeons, anesthesiologists, surgical assistants and nurse anesthetists [5,72,130,256]. Staffing costs are a large portion of costs in surgical care services [10,130].…”

“…Methods: computer simulation [281,300,301,302,334,432,433,490], heuristics [72,130,256], mathematical programming [23,72,130,469], queueing theory [334], literature review [282,351].…”