Integrated Block Sharing: A Win-Win Strategy for Hospitals and Surgeons

W e consider the problem of balancing two competing objectives in the pursuit of efficient management of operating rooms in a hospital: providing surgeons with predictable, reliable access to the operating room and maintaining high utilization of capacity. The common solution to the first problem (in practice) is to grant exclusive " block time, " in which a portion of the week in an operating room is designated to a particular surgeon, barring other surgeons from using this room/time. As a major improvement over this existing approach, we model the possibility of " shared " block time, which need only satisfy capacity constraints in expectation. We reduce the computational difficulty of the resulting NP-hard block-scheduling problem by implementing a column-generation approach and demonstrate the efficacy of this technique using simulation, calibrated to a real hospital's historical data and objectives. Our simulations illustrate substantial benefits to hospitals under a variety of circumstances and demonstrate the advantages of our new approach relative to a benchmark method taken from the recent literature.