Operating Room Planning under Surgery Type and Priority Constraints

Operating room (OR) planning is critical in healthcare systems to reduce cost and improve the efficiency of OR scheduling. The OR planning problem is complicated, involving many conflicting factors, such as overtime and idle time, both of which affect OR utilization and consequently affect cost to a hospital. Allocating different types of surgeries into OR blocks affects the setup cost, whereas priorities of surgeries affect OR block scheduling. Surgery durations affect both OR utilization and OR block scheduling. Traditionally, one important method for OR block scheduling is the bin packing model, and the longest processing time (LPT) rule is the most commonly used method to generate the initial sequence for bin packing. In this study. We propose a multistep approach and a priority-type-duration (PTD) rule to generate the initial sequence for bin packing. The results of our case studies show that our PTD rule outperforms the LPT rule based on the cost to OR scheduling.