Pre-operative Activities and Operating Theater Planning in Emilia-Romagna, Italy

The high costs of health care push national and regional health services as well as local authorities to constantly improve management performances in order to obtain more efficient organization of hospitals activities and provide patients with the best possible care. During the last decade the number of research studies that aim at efficiently organizing and planning surgical activities by reducing costs and keeping a good level of care has dramatically grown. We present a case-study focused on a local hospital department that has to jointly plan operating room assignment to surgeons and patients admission by taking into consideration, for a subset of patients, some compulsory pre-operative activities such as outpatient anesthetist appointment and autologous blood donation. We propose a Mixed Integer Programming model, we test it on real-world instances and we compare the results with the currently used planning procedures