Improvement of operating room performance using a multi-objective mathematical model and data envelopment analysis: A case study

Surgical theater is one of the most expensive hospital sources that a high percentage of hospital admissions are related to it. Therefore, efficient planning and scheduling of the operating rooms (ORs) is necessary to improve the efficiency of any healthcare system. Therefore, in this paper, the weekly OR planning and scheduling problem is addressed to minimize the waiting time of elective patients, overutilization and underutilization costs of ORs and the total completion time of surgeries. We take into account the available hours of ORs and the surgeons, legal constraints and job qualification of surgeons, and priority of patients in the model. A real-life example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the model and is solved using ε-constraint method in GAMS software. Then, data envelopment analysis (DEA) is employed to obtain the best solution among the Pareto solutions obtained by ε-constraint method. Finally, the best Pareto solution is compared to the schedule used in the hospitals. The results indicate the best Pareto solution outperforms the schedule offered by the OR director.