Improving hospital operations by scheduling

초록

Scheduling elective surgery needs to take several factors into consideration such as operating surgeon's schedule, patient's schedule and the bed availability in ICU. Often, the operating surgeons schedule elective surgeries without close communication with the ICU administrator, and the consequence is the frequent cancellation of scheduled surgeries due to bed shortages in the ICU. This paper proposes a method to reduce the cancellation of elective surgeries by an improved communication between surgeons and ICU physicians through which the number of elective surgeries scheduled each day is made stable during the predetermined planning horizon.