Improving surgical theater performance using an integrated and multi-objective mathematical model and data envelopment analysis: A case study

Surgical theater is one of the most sensitive and most expensive hospital sources that a high percentage of hospital admissions are related to it. Therefore, efficient planning and scheduling of the operating rooms is necessary to guarantee optimal use of resources, timely surgery and increase patients’ satisfaction. Therefore, in this paper, the weekly planning and scheduling of the operating rooms is addressed to minimize the waiting time of elective patients, overutilization and underutilization cost of operating rooms and the sum of surgeries’ completion time. We take into account the available hours of operating rooms and the surgeons, legal constraints, the skill level of surgeons and priority of patients in the model. A real-life example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the model and is solved using ε-constraint method in GAMS software. Then, data envelopment analysis is employed to obtain the preferred solution among the Pareto solutions achieved by ε-constraint method, which is compared to the schedule used in the hospitals.

Keywords:

multi objective model , the planning and scheduling , elective patients , data envelopment analysis