TY - GEN
T1 - Comparing two operating-room-allocation policies for elective and emergency surgeries
AU - Ferrand, Yann
AU - Magazine, Michael
AU - Rao, Uday
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2011 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - When organizing the operating theatre and scheduling surgeries, hospitals face a trade-off between the need to be responsive to emergency cases and to conduct scheduled elective surgeries efficiently. We develop a simulation model to compare a flexible and a focused resource-allocation policy. We evaluate these two policies on patient and provider outcome measures, including patient wait time and physician overtime. We find that the focused policy results in lower elective wait time and lower overtime, which leads to the conclusion that electives benefit more from the elimination of emergency disruptions than what they lose from the reduced access to operating rooms. Emergency patient wait time, however, increases significantly as we shift from the flexible to the focused policy. The sensitivity analysis showed that average emergency wait time can decrease as the processing time variability increases. The trade-off between efficiency and responsiveness calls for additional research on other operating-room-allocation policies.
AB - When organizing the operating theatre and scheduling surgeries, hospitals face a trade-off between the need to be responsive to emergency cases and to conduct scheduled elective surgeries efficiently. We develop a simulation model to compare a flexible and a focused resource-allocation policy. We evaluate these two policies on patient and provider outcome measures, including patient wait time and physician overtime. We find that the focused policy results in lower elective wait time and lower overtime, which leads to the conclusion that electives benefit more from the elimination of emergency disruptions than what they lose from the reduced access to operating rooms. Emergency patient wait time, however, increases significantly as we shift from the flexible to the focused policy. The sensitivity analysis showed that average emergency wait time can decrease as the processing time variability increases. The trade-off between efficiency and responsiveness calls for additional research on other operating-room-allocation policies.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79951631270&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79951631270&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/WSC.2010.5678933
DO - 10.1109/WSC.2010.5678933
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:79951631270
SN - 9781424498666
T3 - Proceedings - Winter Simulation Conference
SP - 2364
EP - 2374
BT - Proceedings of the 2010 Winter Simulation Conference, WSC'10
T2 - 2010 43rd Winter Simulation Conference, WSC'10
Y2 - 5 December 2010 through 8 December 2010
ER -