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.