The Surgical Patient Routing Problem: A Central Planner Approach

Abstract

M any patients face difficulties when accessing medical facilities, particularly in rural areas. To alleviate these concerns, medical centers may offer transportation to eligible patients. However, the operation of such services is typically not tightly coordinated with the scheduling of medical appointments. Motivated by our collaborations with the U.S. Veterans Health Administration, we propose an integrated approach that simultaneously considers patient routing and operating room scheduling decisions. We model this problem as a mixedinteger program. Unfortunately, realistically sized instances of this problem are intractable, so we focus on a special case of the problem that captures the needs of low-volume (e.g., rural) hospitals. We establish structural properties that are exploited to develop a branch-and-price algorithm, which greatly outperforms a commercial solver on the original formulation. We discuss several algorithmic strategies to improve the overall solution efficiency. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach through an extensive computational study calibrated with clinical data. Our results demonstrate that there exist opportunities for healthcare providers to significantly improve the quality of their services by integrating scheduling and routing decisions.

Operating room planning and scheduling for outpatients and inpatients: A review and future research

“…It is subject to a set of mathematical constraints that portray the conditions under which the decisions have to be made. These models can then be solved by using standard software (e.g., CPLEX solver [12,87]) or by developing exact solution methods (e.g., branch-and-price [121,138]).…”

Planning and scheduling operating rooms for elective and emergency surgeries with uncertain duration

“…In Yin et al (2016) they consider elective patient surgery in multiple operating theatres where the different stages of surgery is optimised as a complex connected patients flow problem. Nemati et al (2016) integrate the transport of patients to the surgery unit with the optimisation of the operating schedule.…”

An Outer Approximation Method for Scheduling Elective Surgeries with Sequence Dependent Setup Times to Multiple Operating Rooms

“…The advantage of exact solution methods is that they provide a single optimal solution. The exact methods used in literature include column generation [24,[50][51][52][53], dynamic programming [54][55][56][57][58], branch and bound [42,[59][60][61][62], branch and price [54,55,[63][64][65], and branch and cut methods [66,67]. In addition, researchers have considered heuristics [68][69][70], hybrid methods [71,72], and metaheuristics [44,62,73] for operating room planning and scheduling problems.…”