Capacity management for the operating room

Managing operating rooms (ORs) is a challenging task. The problem setting we research originates from a real hospital setting, where capacity is periodically assigned to surgical disciplines, patients are scheduled dynamically (i.e., at the time of their consultation) and patients are rescheduled on the day of surgery (in order to mitigate the effect of overtime). The problem faced by the hospital is that patients are served later then their due time. Additionally, since ORs in the hospital are highly utilized, non-elective patients are disturbing the planned elective schedule. This disturbance is resolved by rescheduling actions such as OR reassignments and on-day cancellations. This talk discusses different policies for the division of OR capacity among different surgical disciplines and patient urgency categories. We use a fixed scheduling algorithm and focus on both the use of flexibility in the capacity allocation schema and the applied access policy. Using a simulation model, we evaluate how these policies affect the ORs of the hospital over a wide range of performance measures. In addition, we compare the performance of the simulated policies with pre and post data from a university hospital after such capacity changes were implemented.status: publishe