A two-phase integrated approach for elective surgery and bed management problems

This paper focuses on developing a framework to support quantitative decision making for planning processes involving both OR-departments and medical departments. We propose a multi-objective optimization model that manages elective surgery scheduling, elective patients and bed scheduling at the same time in order to provide access to care in a timely manner and improve hospital efficiency. Patient waiting time, as well as patient specialty and patient length of stay are considered. The multi-objective model is solved as a single-objective in two-phase in order to maximize the number of scheduled surgeries and admit patients with early registration date. We test it on realistic instances and present computational results in terms of OR utilization and bed occupancy level. We show that the number of beds can be a bottleneck for an OR departments and that unused beds are due to gender policies and/or inconsistency with respect to patient length of stays.