A two-stage approach for surgery scheduling

A scheduling theory model is applied to study surgery scheduling in hospitals. If a surgical patient is regarded as a job waiting to be processed, and the related surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and surgical equipment as machines that are simultaneously needed for the processing of job, then the surgery scheduling can be described as a parallel machines scheduling problem in which a job is processed by multiple machines simultaneously. We adopt the two-stage approach to solve this scheduling problem and develop a computerized surgery scheduling system to handle such a task. This system was implemented in the Shanghai First People’s Hospital and increased the quantity of average monthly finished operations by 10.33 %, the utilization rate of expensive equipment by 9.66 % and the patient satisfaction degree by 1.12 %, and decreased the average length of time that patients wait for surgery by 0.46 day.