Dynamic Master Surgical Schedules for a Medium Size Hospital

This talk deals with planning and scheduling the operating theater of a medium-sized hospital for elective surgery. In a block-scheduling strategy, first the Master Surgical Schedule (MSS) is determined, assigning different surgical disciplines to the available operating room sessions. Then, elective surgeries are selected and allocated to each session. While in most hospitals the MSS is kept constant throughout the year, in this talk we want to investigate the potential improvements (in terms of quality of service) from having a MSS that dynamically changes, depending on the actual state of the waiting lists. This is in line with a lean approach to patient flow, according to which the demand (patients) should pull processing (operations). We present various approaches to MSS design and operation scheduling, and the results obtained by applying the proposed models to the operating theater of a public hospital in Empoli, Italy. Experiments over a one-year time horizon show that even a limited degree of flexibility in MSS design allows major improvements in workload balancing and due date performance.