Operating room scheduling and surgeon assignment problem under surgery durations uncertainty.

BACKGROUND: Scientific management methods are urgently needed to balance the demand and supply of heath care services in Chinese hospitals. Operating theatre is the bottleneck and costliest department. Therefore, the surgery scheduling is crucial to hospital management.

OBJECTIVE: To increase the utilization and reduce the cost of operating theatre, and to improve surgeons' satisfaction in the meantime, a practical surgery scheduling which could assign the operating room (OR) and surgeon for the surgery and sequence surgeries in each OR was provided for hospital managers.

METHODS: Surgery durations were predicted by fitting the distributions. A two-step mixed integer programming model considering surgery duration uncertainty was proposed, and sample average approximation (SAA) method was applied to solve the model.

RESULTS: Durations of various surgeries were log-normal distributed respectively. Numerical experiments showed the model and method could get good solutions with different sample sizes.

CONCLUSIONS: Real-life constraints and duration uncertainty were considered in the study, and the model was also very applicable in practice. Average overtime of each OR was reducing and tending to be stable with the number of surgeons increasing, which is a discipline for OR management.