Solving the operating room scheduling problem with prioritized lists of patients

The scheduling of surgical interventions directly impacts the number of patients that can be treated with given operating room resources. Medical centres often do not respond satisfactorily to the demand for interventions, and the shortcomings of traditional manual scheduling approaches contribute to the growth of waiting lists. In addition to the timetabling aspect, operating room scheduling methods must determine the order in which patients should be treated as a function of their relative priorities. This paper develops and compares two optimization models and two algorithms for scheduling interventions over a defined period that satisfy patient priority criteria. The four mathematical methods were studied under a range of different scenarios using real data from a public hospital in Chile. Improvements in operating room utilization rates using the proposed formulations ranged from 10 to 15 % over the current manual techniques, but the choice of method in any given real application will depend on the scenarios likely to be encountered.