Operating room scheduling for non-operating room anesthesia with emergency uncertainty

How to improve the efficiency of operating rooms (ORs) has always been a challenging problem in the context of healthcare operations management. This paper focuses on the research of operating room scheduling under non-operatingroomanesthesia (NORA) mechanism, in the presence of the uncertainty of emergency arrivals. In particular, we examine the advantages of the NORA mechanism in comparison with traditional surgical anesthesia practice under different operating room settings. Operationally, the process is comprised of two stages: (1) initial scheduling and (2) rescheduling. In the first stage, the initial schedule for elective surgeries under NORA is first performed through our developed model. With experiments, it is shown that for different operating room settings, the NORA mechanism can significantly improve the operating room utilization in comparison with the traditional OR anesthesia process. In the second stage of rescheduling, our experiment results show that the rescheduling model can effectively address the disruptions caused by the random arrival of emergency patients.