Simulation-based evaluation of operating room management policies

Since operating rooms are a major bottleneck resource and an important revenue driver in hospitals, it is important to use these resources efficiently. Studies estimate that between 60 and 70% of hospital admissions are due to surgeries. Furthermore, staffing cannot be changed daily to respond to changing demands. The resulting high complexity in operating room management necessitates perpetual process evaluation and the use of decision support tools. In this study, we evaluate several management policies and their consequences for the operating theater of the University Hospital Augsburg.

Based on a data set with 12,946 surgeries, we evaluate management policies such as parallel induction of anesthesia with varying levels of staff support, the use of a dedicated emergency room, extending operating room hours reserved as buffer capacity, and different elective patient sequencing policies. We develop a detailed simulation model that serves to capture the process flow in the entire operating theater: scheduling surgeries from a dynamically managed waiting list, handling various types of schedule disruptions, rescheduling and prioritizing postponed and deferred surgeries, and reallocating operating room capacity. The system performance is measured by indicators such as patient waiting time, idle time, staff overtime, and the number of deferred surgeries.

We identify significant trade-offs between expected waiting times for different patient urgency categories when operating rooms are opened longer to serve as end-of-day buffers. The introduction of parallel induction of anesthesia allows for additional patients to be scheduled and operated on during regular hours. However, this comes with a higher number of expected deferrals, which can be partially mitigated by employing additional anesthesia teams. Changes to the sequencing of elective patients according to their expected surgery duration cause expectable outcomes for a multitude of performance indicators.

Our simulation-based approach allows operating theater managers to test a multitude of potential changes in operating room management without disrupting the ongoing workflow. The close collaboration between management and researchers in the design of the simulation framework and the data analysis has yielded immediate benefits for the scheduling policies and data collection efforts at our practice partner.