A dual bin-packing approach to scheduling surgical cases at a publicly-funded hospital

Publicly-funded hospitals are typically allocated an annual budget by the government based on the number of enrollees in the region. Given tight budget constraints, the capacity of resources is fairly fixed. Such hospitals strive to maximize the utilization of their resources through continuous improvement and optimization techniques. We address a surgical case scheduling problem experienced at a publicly-funded hospital and conceptualize this multi-period, multi-resource, priority-based case scheduling problem as an unequal-sized, multi-bin, multi-dimensional dual bin-packing problem. A mixed integer programming model and a heuristic based on the first fit decreasing algorithm are presented. Resource availability, case priorities, and variation in surgery times are key features included in our model. Our proposed approach led to substantial savings, 20% reduction in number of days and up to 20% increase in operating room utilization, when compared to real schedules obtained from the surgical department at a publicly-funded hospital.

[1]  Eldo E. Frezza,et al.  The Business of Surgery , 2007 .

[2]  Erik Demeulemeester,et al.  Sequencing surgical cases in a day-care environment: An exact branch-and-price approach , 2009, Comput. Oper. Res..

[3]  Edmund K. Burke,et al.  Local search for the surgery admission planning problem , 2011, J. Heuristics.

[4]  Brian T. Denton,et al.  Operating Room Pooling and Parallel Surgery Processing Under Uncertainty , 2011, INFORMS J. Comput..

[5]  D Sier,et al.  Scheduling surgical procedures , 1997 .

[6]  Pratik J. Parikh,et al.  Selecting between batch and zone order picking strategies in a distribution center , 2008 .

[7]  Pierre Ladet,et al.  OPERATING ROOMS SCHEDULING , 2006 .

[8]  Erik Demeulemeester,et al.  Operating room planning and scheduling: A literature review , 2010, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[9]  Richard L Jackson,et al.  The business of surgery. Managing the OR as a profit center requires more than just IT. It requires a profit-making mindset, too. , 2002, Health management technology.

[10]  Alain Guinet,et al.  Operating theatre planning. , 2003, Nursing mirror and midwives journal.

[11]  Erwin W. Hans,et al.  Robust surgery loading , 2008, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[12]  Brian Denton,et al.  Optimization of surgery sequencing and scheduling decisions under uncertainty , 2007, Health care management science.

[13]  Mehmet A. Begen,et al.  Surgical block scheduling in a system of hospitals: an application to resource and wait list management in a British Columbia health authority , 2007, Health care management science.

[14]  Yuehwern Yih,et al.  An elective surgery scheduling problem considering patient priority , 2010, Comput. Oper. Res..

[15]  Frédéric Grimaud,et al.  Optimization methods for a stochastic surgery planning problem , 2009 .

[16]  Erik Demeulemeester,et al.  Optimizing a multiple objective surgical case sequencing problem , 2009 .

[17]  Andreas Klinkert,et al.  Surgical case scheduling as a generalized job shop scheduling problem , 2008, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[18]  Luis G. Vargas,et al.  The Surgical Scheduling Problem: Current Research and Future Opportunities , 2011 .

[19]  G. Kazemier,et al.  Improving Operating Room Efficiency by Applying Bin-Packing and Portfolio Techniques to Surgical Case Scheduling , 2007, Anesthesia and analgesia.