Time: 11:00am to 12:15pm
Venue: Room 7-208, 7/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building
The issue of allocating capacity to accommodate emergent surgery cases while scheduling elective patients has major policy implications for Level-1 trauma centers including most large academic medical centers. This is because operating rooms (ORs) are the greatest source of revenues for hospitals, while also being the largest cost centers. However, scheduling ORs, especially at level-1 trauma hospitals, is challenging due to significant uncertainty in the arrivals of patients requiring emergent surgery. When scheduling surgeries, hospitals face a trade-off between the need to be responsive to emergency cases and the need to conduct scheduled elective surgeries as planned.
We develop a model that allocates the OR capacity for elective patients so that the emergency patients who arrive randomly can be accommodated without incurring any excessive delays. The objective is to develop a framework for aggregate weekly schedules and generate detailed daily schedules that minimize a weighted sum of the ORs' operating time, idle time, and overtime. Optimization procedures are developed to devise effective block schedules while a rescheduling procedure schedules elective patients who are affected by an emergency arrival. The procedures are based on deterministic surgery times for the elective patients and then are extended to stochastic surgery times. We illustrate our methodology on specialized ORs for trauma cases related to neurosurgery. We show that for a given arrival rate of emergency patients, the total expected cost is convex in the weekly load of the elective surgeries scheduled. Numerical experiments are devised to obtain the total expected cost curves for various arrival rates of emergency patients. Using these cost curves the optimal capacity allocation of ORs to elective patients can be determined as a function of the arrival rate of emergency patients.
Professor Pinedo received an Ir. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands in 1973 and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. Michael Pinedo is the Julius Schlesinger Professor of Operations Management in the Department of Information, Operations and Management Sciences at New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Professor Pinedo's research focuses on the modeling of production and service systems, and, more specifically, on the planning and scheduling of these systems. Recently, his research also has focused on operational risk in financial services. Professor Pinedo is currently editor of the Journal of Scheduling(Wiley). He is also associate editor of Management Science, associate editor of Naval Research Logistics, department editor of Production and Operations Management, associate editor of Manufacturing and Services Operations Management, and associate editor of the Journal of Operational Risk.