Minimizing Total Clinical Deterioration in Operating Theatres

Efficient operating theatre (OT) planning and scheduling contributes substantially to better utilization of a hospitalgh2019;s expensive resources and superior management of its complex operations. This study investigates the OT planning and scheduling problem at both tactical and operational decision levels to meet the hospital administration's expectations and patients' satisfaction simultaneously. The main goal is to concurrently allocate surgical specialties to operating rooms by developing a master surgery schedule (MSS), and solve the surgical case assignment problem (SCAP), which assigns a particular surgery day and time block to each elective patient. To minimize the total patients' clinical condition deterioration, we propose two dynamic programming based heuristic algorithms, a mixed integer programming model (MIP), and an iterated local search (ILS) approach. We perform extensive computational experiments with 1500 instances. The results demonstrate the efficacy of our heuristic algorithms as well as the proposed ILS, which generates high quality solutions across all problem instances with an average optimality gap of 1.51%.