Integrated Block Sharing: A Win-Win Strategy for Hospitals and Surgeons

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Day, Robert; Garfinkel, Robert; Thompson, Steven
• 署名单位: University of Connecticut; University of Richmond
• 刊物名称: M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1523-4614
• DOI: 10.1287/msom.1110.0372
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 567-583
• 关键词: healthcare management; math programming; production planning and scheduling; service operations

摘要

We consider the problem of balancing two competing objectives in the pursuit of efficient management of operating rooms in a hospital: providing surgeons with predictable, reliable access to the operating room and maintaining high utilization of capacity. The common solution to the first problem (in practice) is to grant exclusive block time, in which a portion of the week in an operating room is designated to a particular surgeon, barring other surgeons from using this room/time. As a major improvement over this existing approach, we model the possibility of shared block time, which need only satisfy capacity constraints in expectation. We reduce the computational difficulty of the resulting NP-hard block-scheduling problem by implementing a column-generation approach and demonstrate the efficacy of this technique using simulation, calibrated to a real hospital's historical data and objectives. Our simulations illustrate substantial benefits to hospitals under a variety of circumstances and demonstrate the advantages of our new approach relative to a benchmark method taken from the recent literature.