The operating room (OR) department of a hospital forms the heart of the organization, where the single largest cost is incurred. This document presents and reports on the “Operating Room Manager Game”, developed to give insight into managing a large hospital’s OR department at various levels of control, and the difficulties of applying OR/MS techniques in healthcare. The players take on the rol...

A great part of the population that is operated has to wait a long time to access the surgical procedure, and as time elapses the condition of these patients degenerates. On the other hand, the amount of time during which operating rooms are idle is signi cant. Thus, optimizing the operating theater becomes important to reduce the time patients wait for their treatment and to avoid unnecessary ...

Gillespie and colleagues have reported on their structured observations in operating rooms to help us understand which factors (interruptions, communication failures, team familiarity and the unpredictability of unplanned cases) prolong the length of an operation and lead to inefficiency and increased costs. All of us feel intuitively that a well-orchestrated operation is best for everyone invo...

To the Editor:—We read with interest the article by Smith et al., and we congratulate the authors on increasing both major joint arthroplasty throughput and profitability by implementing a parallel processing system. In their model, the authors describe the anesthesia induction room as either an “underutilized operating room (OR)” or “a shared induction area bed space.” If at all possible, howe...

The operating room (OR) department of a hospital forms the heart of the organization, where the single largest cost is incurred. This document presents and reports on the “Operating Room Manager Game”, developed to give insight into managing a large hospital’s OR department at various levels of control, and the difficulties of applying OR/MS techniques in healthcare. The players take on the rol...

Despite the introduction of the Universal Protocol, patient safety in surgery remains a daily challenge in the operating room. This present study describes one community health system's efforts to improve operating room safety through human factors training and ultimately the development of a surgical checklist. Using a combination of formal training, local studies documenting operating room sa...

Operating rooms (ORs) in US hospitals are costly to staff, generate about 70 % of a hospital's revenues, and operate at a staffed-capacity utilization of 60-70 %. Many hospitals allocate blocks of OR time to individual or groups of surgeons as guaranteed allocation, who book surgeries one at a time in their blocks. The booking procedure frequently results in unused time between surgeries. Reali...