Abstract
A scheduling theory model is applied to study surgery scheduling in hospitals. If a surgical patient is regarded as a job waiting to be processed, and the related surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and surgical equipment as machines that are simultaneously needed for the processing of job, then the surgery scheduling can be described as a parallel machines scheduling problem in which a job is processed by multiple machines simultaneously. We adopt the two-stage approach to solve this scheduling problem and develop a computerized surgery scheduling system to handle such a task. This system was implemented in the Shanghai First People’s Hospital and increased the quantity of average monthly finished operations by 10.33 %, the utilization rate of expensive equipment by 9.66 % and the patient satisfaction degree by 1.12 %, and decreased the average length of time that patients wait for surgery by 0.46 day.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Blake JT, Carter MW (1997) Surgical process scheduling: a structured review. J Health Syst 5:17–30
Boldy D (1976) A review of the application of mathematical programming to tactical and strategic health and social services problems. Oper Res Q 27:439–448
Brucker P (2008) Scheduling algorithms, 3rd revised edn. Springer, Heidelberg
Cardoen B, Demeulemeester E, Belie J (2010) Operating room planning and scheduling: a literature review. Eur J Oper Res 201:921–932
Magerlein JM, Martin JB (1978) Surgical demand scheduling: a review. Health Serv Res 13(4):418–433
Pierskalla WP, Brailer DJ (1994) Applications of operations research in health care delivery. In: Operations research and the public sector. North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp 469–505
Przasnyski Z (1986) Operating room scheduling: a literature review. AORN J 44:67–79
Smith-Daniels VL, Schweikhart SB, Smith-Daniels DE (1988) Capacity management in health care services: review and future research directions. Decis Sci 19:889–919
Yang Y, Sullivan KM, Wang PP, Naidu KD (2000) Applications of computer simulation in medical scheduling. In: Proceedings of the joint conference on information sciences
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Zhong, L., Luo, S., Wu, L. et al. A two-stage approach for surgery scheduling. J Comb Optim 27, 545–556 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-012-9535-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-012-9535-2