Abstract:
BACKGROUND: Operating Room (OR) is the core sector in
hospital expenditure, the operation management of which involves a complete
three-stage surgery flow, multiple resources, prioritization of the various
surgeries, and several real-life OR constraints. As such reasonable surgery
scheduling is crucial to OR management. OBJECTIVE: To optimize OR management and reduce operation cost, a
short-term surgery scheduling problem is proposed and defined based on the
survey of the OR operation in a typical hospital in China. METHOD: The comprehensive operation cost is clearly defined
considering both under-utilization and overutilization. A nested Ant Colony
Optimization (nested-ACO) incorporated with several real-life OR constraints
is proposed to solve such a combinatorial optimization problem. RESULTS: The 10-day manual surgery schedules from a hospital in
China are compared with the optimized schedules solved by the nested-ACO.
Comparison results show the advantage using the nested-ACO in several
measurements: OR-related time, nurse-related time, variation in resources'
working time, and the end time. CONCLUSIONS: The nested-ACO considering real-life operation
constraints such as the difference between first and following case,
surgeries priority, and fixed nurses in pre/post-operative stage is proposed
to solve the surgery scheduling optimization problem. The results clearly
show the benefit of using the nested-ACO in enhancing the OR management
efficiency and minimizing the comprehensive overall operation cost.
Keywords: Surgery scheduling, operation cost, operating room management, ant colony optimization
