Imagine a black and white photograph. The date is 1957. The setting is an operating room at a Baltimore hospital. There is no operating table and a man lies on the floor. The man, a volunteer, is pharmacologically paralyzed and sedated. Several people are gathered around the room, some doctors, several boy scouts and other people from the community. Everyone's attention is focused on one of the...

In this paper I will describe my findings from studying during last year the use of information technology in operating theatres. Based on these findings I will present focus shift analysis as a method for analyzing complex interaction, and discuss how the use of speech commands within the operating theatre are able to address some of the breakdown found with the focus shift analysis.

In 2007, total health-care spending in the United States reached US $2.3 trillion, and continues to rise at the fastest rate in US history. The design and implementation of better planning and scheduling systems is an important area to study in order to reduce high costs and improve access to services in the health-care system. Surgery scheduling, in particular, is an area with significant pote...

The planning of surgical operations forms a substantial element of hospital management. It is characterized by high complexity, which is caused by the uncertainty between the capacity offered and the true demand. Also, as emergency cases occur the planning requirements change. In our approach the proposals for the schedules are made with the help of the heuristics. In order for a schedule to be...

Operating room (OR) scheduling is an important operational problem for most hospitals. In this study, we present a novel two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming (SMIP) model to minimize total expected operating cost given that scheduling decisions are made before the resolution of uncertainty in surgery durations. By using our model, we quantify the benefit of pooling ORs as a shared res...

In case of a disaster, hospitals must be able to receive, in a short period, injured persons for medical and surgical treatment, using available resources and facilities. In such situations different disruptions widely perturb the execution of the established plans. Then medical resources optimization is fundamental to save human lives. Our works focus on operating rooms scheduling taking into ...

The United States health care system currently faces many challenges, with the most notable one being rising costs. In an effort to decrease those costs, health providers are aiming to improve efficiency in their operations. A primary source of revenue for hospitals and some clinics is the surgery department, making it a key department for improvement in efficiency. Surgery schedules drive the ...

BACKGROUND The Operating Room (OR) is a key resource of all major hospitals, but it also accounts for up 40% of resource costs. Improving cost effectiveness, while maintaining a quality of care, is a universal objective. These goals imply an optimization of planning and a scheduling of the activities involved. This is highly challenging due to the inherent variable and unpredictable nature of s...