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4077. A two-stage operating room scheduling method for reducing hospital surgical waiting times for elective surgery lists

Invited abstract in session WD-15: Surgery Scheduling and Operating Room Planning (2), stream OR in Health Services (ORAHS).

Wednesday, 14:30-16:00
Room: 18 (building: 116)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Victor Riquelme
Center for Mathematical Modeling, Universidad de Chile

Abstract

Chile’s public healthcare system covers nearly 80% of the population. Despite its large coverage, it is characterized by long waiting times of its waiting lists. Our objective is to efficiently schedule hospital operating rooms for elective surgeries, to reduce the mean and median waiting time of the surgical waiting list. Our case study corresponds to a high complexity public pediatric hospital in Santiago, Chile. The hospital works based on morning and afternoon time blocks, each to be allocated to a single specialty for each operating room. Overtime is only allowed for long surgeries.

For a given planning horizon, our strategy consists of two stages. First, we assign the medical specialties to the operating rooms, days, and blocks, by solving an integer linear programming problem that balances the available time in the planning horizon with the required surgery time demanded by each specialty. This considers variables such as the number of hours per block and the availability of surgeons per specialty and day. Second, we assign patients to the blocks based on one or more efficiency metrics. For instance, if only waiting time is considered, priority is given to patients with longer waiting times.

The proposed scheduling model, although suboptimal, is faster than classical single-stage integer linear programming approaches, and shows more flexibility, as patients can be rescheduled without the need to rerun the scheduling once specialties are assigned to blocks.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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