Operations management and health: A decision support system for elective surgery planning

The operating theater is the most critical resource of the surgical process. From a lean perspective, the planning of surgical activities must maintain an alignment between demand and offer. Therefore, it is necessary to find the right trade-off between the need of keeping organizational complexity low, and the need to give appropriate precedence to surgeries in view of their priority class and waiting times. In this paper we introduce decision- making models to determine the Master Surgical Schedule (MSS) and the detailed surgical case assignment. Experimental results carried out on the operating theater of San Giuseppe hospital in Empoli (Italy) show that the introduction of even small amounts of flexibility in the MSS allows to improve operating room usage and quality of service.