Day Surgery Scheduling and Optimization in Large Public Hospitals in China: A Three-Station Job Shop Scheduling Problem

Day surgery scheduling allocates hospital resources to day surgical cases and decides on the time to perform the surgeries in the day surgery center (DSC). Based on the day surgery service process of large public hospitals in China, we found that the service efficiency of the process depends on the utilization of hospital resources efficiently and could be optimized through day surgery scheduling. We described it as a flexible flow shop owing to the three-station nature of surgery. Allocating all types of hospital resources to the three stations and determining the length of time for each stage during surgery are crucial to improving the efficiency of DSC. This paper integrates a three-station job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) into the day surgery scheduling and optimization problem. The JSSP was formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model, and the elicitation of the model for scheduling surgeries with different priorities in the DSC is discussed. The model illustrated a case study of the DSC within West China Hospital (WCH). Numerical experiments based on the genetic algorithm design were conducted. Compared to the other optimization strategies, we proposed that the three-station job shop scheduling strategy (TSJS) could not only improve the efficiency and reduce the waiting time of the patients of the DSC in large public hospitals in China but also allow for timely scheduling adjustments during the advent of emergency surgeries.