Analyzing the relationship between physicians’ experience and surgery duration

To construct good quality plans or planning systems in hospitals, such as capacity planning, case mix planning, master surgery scheduling, and shift scheduling, knowing details about the duration of surgeries is paramount. Furthermore, the operating room is one of a hospital’s main cost drivers, thus making surgery duration a key to achieving cost effectiveness. To gain a better understanding of the interdependencies of determining surgery durations, we investigate the influence physicians have on the duration of a surgery. Since physician experience is a very generalizable factor across a heterogeneous group of hospitals, it is the most obvious influencing factor to analyze. Accordingly, we utilize information regarding a physician’s level of experience and examine its impact on surgery durations using data from a German hospital. Although we are forced to use aggregate data for privacy and labor law reasons, a combination of linear and quantile regression analysis allows us to derive several important insights. First, on average, an increase in a physician’s experience leads to a decrease in the duration of a surgery. Second, the effect of the first insight depends on the composition of the surgical team and diminishes in the case of teaching activities. Third, the relationship between experience level and surgery duration varies across the distribution of durations, i.e., the relationship is strongest for short surgeries and weakens as the duration of a surgery increases.