Surgical suits allocate a large amount of expenses to hospitals; on the other hand, they constitute a huge part of hospital revenues. Patient flow optimization in a surgical suite by omitting or reducing bottlenecks which cause loss of time is one of the key solutions in minimizing the patients’ length of stay[1] (LOS) in the system, lowering the expenses, increasing efficiency, and also enhanc...

T wo decades after the first reported robotic surgical procedure [1], surgical robots are just beginning to be widely used in the operating room or interventional suite. The da Vinci telerobotic system (Intuitive Surgical, Inc.), for example, has recently become more widely employed for minimally invasive surgery [2]. This article, the first in a three-part series, examines the core concepts un...

This paper proposes a global and complete decision support tool able to help decision makers in the reengineering of a surgical suite. Under increasing economic pressure and subject to rapid evolutions of technology and surgical protocols, hospitals have to consider radical organisational changes to ensure continuous efficiency. Recent findings in enterprise modelling highlight the importance o...

Outpatient surgery scheduling involves the coordination of several activities in an uncertain environment. Due to the very customized nature of surgical procedures there is significant uncertainty in the duration of activities related to the intake process, surgical procedure, and recovery process. Furthermore, there are multiple criteria which must be traded off when considering how to schedul...

A permanently mounted angiography suite in an operating room (OR) is considered to be a hybrid OR. However, regular use for angiographic interventions is restricted with this setup. We introduce an alternative use of space for the efficient utilisation of an angiographic suite outside the surgical unit. This concept includes three scenarios that describe a modification of the catheter suite acc...