Operating Room Scheduling considering Patient Priority: Case of Shomal Hospital in Amol

Abstract

Nowadays, hospitals are seeking to reduce their costs and to improve their financial circumstances. They are looking to reach the highest level of patient satisfaction as well. Operating rooms are one of the most critical departments and a great source of income in hospitals. In this research, an operating room scheduling problem is studied, which considers patient priorities based on a real case study. The problem comes from a medium-size private hospital in the north of Iran. To tackle this problem, a mixed-integer-program model is presented. The model considers the hospital's resources and constraints as well as patients' priority according to their age and the type of operation they need. In this model, assigning elective patients to operating rooms and the sequence of patients' surgeries have determined to minimize the surgeon waiting time as the objective function. The model is implemented in Cplex 12.9 software, and the efficiency of the model is shown by comparing the obtained results with the current situation. Real data of one week from the hospital is used to prove the efficiency of the model. Analyzing the results show a 35 percent improvement compare to the hospital's current scheduling method.