Surgery scheduling with recovery resources

ABSTRACTSurgical services are large revenue sources that account for a large portion of hospital expenses. Thus, efficient resource allocation is crucial in this system; however, this is a challenging problem, in part due to the interaction of the different stages of the surgery delivery system and the uncertainty of surgery and recovery durations. This article focuses on single-day in-patient elective surgery scheduling considering surgeons, operating rooms (ORs), and the post-anesthesia care unit (recovery). We propose a mixed-integer programming formulation of this problem and then present a fast two-phase heuristic: phase 1 is used for determining the number of ORs to open for the day and surgeon-to-OR assignments, and phase 2 is used for surgical case sequencing. Both phases have provable worst-case performance guarantees and excellent average case performance. We evaluate schedules under uncertainty using a discrete-event simulation model based on data provided by a mid-sized hospital. We show that ...