Imhoff Lisa: Scheduling elective surgeries to maximize the probability of timely treatment for emergencies
ARBEITSBERICHTE DES INSTITUTS FÜR UNTERNEHMENSFÜHRUNG, RUHR-UNIVERSITÄT BOCHUM, 121 (2019)
ABSTRACT
Hospitals need to consider elective patients as well as emergencies when scheduling the operating theater. An urgent emergency surgery can start as soon as an operating room is available. Hence, the emergency patient mostly has to wait until an elective surgery ends. Existing literature proposes a deterministic approach for scheduling elective patients that distributes their end times of surgeries evenly over the day. That way, timely access to an operating room in case of sudden emergencies is facilitated. In reality, treatment times of patients are not precisely predictable. In this paper, the probability of an emergency to be assigned to an operating room within reasonable time will be maximized by advantageously scheduling elective patients. For this purpose, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and a simulation study is applied to verify the operational performance.