ORAHS 2015

HEC Montréal, July 19 - 24, 2015

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ORAHS2015

HEC Montréal, 19 July — 31 August 2015

Schedule Authors My Schedule

TUA Tutorial 1

Jul 21, 2015 09:00 AM – 10:00 AM

Location: BDC

Chaired by Sally Brailsford

1 Presentation

  • 09:00 AM - 10:00 AM

    Scheduling patients at the UZ Leuven

    • Erik Demeulemeester, presenter, KU Leuven

    In many hospitals there are patients who receive surgery later than what is medically advised. In
    one of Europe's largest hospitals, the UZ Leuven, this is the case for approximately every third
    patient. Serving patients late is a problem as they might consequently be exposed to an increased
    health risk.
    In order to improve the current situation, the lateness of patients had to be quantified and the
    responsible mechanism, the patient scheduling process, better understood. Drawing from this
    understanding, we implemented and tested different patient scheduling methods using a discrete
    event simulation model. In order to get a realistic test environment, we tried to avoid making any
    assumptions. Instead we investigated and modeled all the mechanisms that we found to have an
    important impact on the way patients are scheduled and served at the hospital in reality.
    We found that it is important to model the non-elective to OR allocation mechanisms in place
    and, additionally, also to include elective rescheduling. Modeling rescheduling ensures that OR
    related performance metrics, such as overtime, will only loosely depend on the chosen patient
    scheduling method.
    We also found that capacity considerations should guide both patient scheduling and replanning
    related decision making. This is the case as those scheduling strategies that ensure that OR
    capacity is efficiently used will also result in a high number of patients served within their
    medically advised time limit. An efficient use of OR capacity can be achieved, for instance, by
    serving patients first come, first served. As applying first come, first serve might not always be
    possible in a real setting, it is important to allow for patient replanning.

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