Software Tool for Operating Room Scheduling in a Spanish Hospital Department

Abstract

Medical doctors working in hospitals should spend their working time taking care of the patients. However, in the Spanish hospitals, they also play the role of decision makers being involved, for example, in scheduling surgeries in operation rooms. Although some doctors might be doing this for a long time, which give them experience in such decisions, the efficiency of the operation room can be improved with the help of some technical solutions that are the result of advance research in planning and scheduling surgeries. Such technical solutions can also decrease the overtime hours and reduce the under/over utilization of some operating rooms. This paper’s focus is to create such a solution that will help medical doctors to spend less time in managing tasks and have a better occupancy rate within the available capacity of the operation room. It will also decrease the stress level and allow the medical doctors to offer more of their time to healthcare. The contributions of this paper are: (i) a new heuristic algorithm for scheduling operations that do not require the use of any optimization tool, (ii) an in-built managing system for patients and operation rooms in the Operating Theater, and (iii) simulation results using real data in the proposed software tool. The created interface is intuitive and developed with direct feedback from doctors allowing different access level, for a better security of the medical data.