Impact statement: The evaluation of operating room scheduling settings

Abstract

Improving the productivity of operating rooms (ORs) is one of the key and challenging problems in hospital operations, since ORs have been the greatest source of both revenues and costs (Ghazalbash et al., 2012). One solution is to look into the OR scheduling optimization. Extensive optimization strategies are proposed in literature attempting to improve the efficiency of ORs, and simulation models are used to validate, test and evaluate the performance of the scheduling strategies before they get to the clinical practice. The next article, by Wang et al., presents a discrete event simulation model to evaluate the performance of OR scheduling strategies under distributed OR scheduling (DORS) settings. It first fills the gap to demonstrate the