Proposing a Two-Step Method for Creating and Updating the Master Surgical Scheduling Program

In this paper the integrated Master Surgical Scheduling program and Case Mix Planning is investigated. A new two-step approach is proposed for creating and updating this program. In the first step, a model is proposed for creating master surgical schedule considering the demand distributions of different surgery kind of each surgeon. In the second step, having the weekly waiting list of patients, a model is proposed for updating this program in order to cope with demand fluctuations and maximize the use of operating rooms capacity in weekly period. In this paper the limitation of down-stream resources is also considered. Three objectives are considered for this problem: minimizing over time cost and idle time cost of operating rooms, maximizing the surgeons’ preferences and minimizing the not fulfilled demand. The real data from Al-Zahra hospital of Isfahan, Iran is used to evaluate the models and analyze the results. The proposed approach is evaluated using these real data in several problem instances. The experiments show that the proposed approach leads to better results than real program of hospital with significant different which displays the efficiency of the proposed approach.