A decision support tool for the urgent surgeries assignment problem

Abstract EN

Purpose -in this paper, nonelective patients are assigned in an already existing operating block schedule, both respecting health and cost-efficiency objectives.

design / methodology / approach-we designed and developed assignment strategies, in function of three patient classes : emergent, urgent, and work in case.

the global objectives are both the assignment of the maximal amount of nonelective cases and global operating block overtime cost-efficiency.

findings - the developed strategies have been tested and validated with a 4-operating-room block, with 5 specialties, with a 7-hour regular opening time, 2-hours-allowed overtime, on a 5-day planning horizon.

results show an improvement on both operating rooms capacity filling and supplementary hours overruns limitation.

research implications - strategies are independent on the benchmark test values.

they are adapted to 3 patient classes, and on the objectives aimed for each class.

practical implications-the decision support tool has been developed with and validated by a west european hospital surgical team.

the strategies can be adopted by any other comparable hospital block.

social implications-developing the here presented strategies in developed countries hospitals could help them limit their health care budget overruns.

originality / value-scientific results obtained are twofold.

firstly, all proposed strategies have been validated and show effectiveness and relevancy for the addressed problem, in real time conditions.secondly, the tool also assesses, for a given operating block, with a given provisional schedule, the number of nonelective surgeries that can be accommodated.