Bir İhtisas Hastanesinde Ameliyathane Programının Optimizasyonu: Bir Vaka Uygulaması

Abstract

The operations management in health services has recently become extremely important since hospitals’ main objective is to provide high-quality health services to patients while reducing their costs and improving their financial assets for their survival and growth. In this respect, operating rooms are of great interest to the hospitals since they are the hospital’s largest cost and revenue center. However, despite their criticality in health services, they are generally bottleneck resources in hospitals. Therefore, increasing the efficiency of operating rooms results in improved patient satisfaction and reduction in the cost of surgical operations. At this stage, operating room scheduling is the key to accomplish these two conflicting goals at a reasonable level simultaneously. It includes the timing of each operation as well as the assignment of surgical resources to each operation such as operating room and surgical teams over a few days or a week. Operating room surgical schedules often present logistical difficulties in terms of assigning doctors to specific operating rooms. Due to a wide variety of factors such as room availability, working hours in a week, doctor preferences, and operating room capabilities, surgical scheduling can prove to be challenging. In many hospital administrators manually modify the assignments on a case-by-case basis, which makes it difficult and time-consuming when dealing with surgical schedules. In this paper, we try to implement a linear programming procedure, which transforms the operating room schedule into a working schedule that dynamically changes weekly; and can be programmed to incorporate different scenarios within the hospital-based on specific hospital parameters. With the application of a binary linear programming model on illustrative problems by using Excel Solver Add-in, we demonstrate the advantages of using such an approach in optimizing static and dynamic surgical assignments weekly in order to meet a specific goal.