Abstract
Efficient elective surgery scheduling is one of the pain points in the current healthcare management and has a serious impact on the overall healthcare delivery. Currently, the health organizations struggle to achieve their elective surgeries/outpatient targets due to clinical and non-clinical reasons. Some of the common factors are day of surgery cancellations, use of medications, and development of unforeseen clinical complexities. Nonclinical factors could be surgeon’s schedule and unavailability of the operating rooms or equipment. Overcoming these issues will enable the hospital to increase their efficiency and ultimately serve more patients within the allocated budgets with reduced wait-times for the surgery. This research presents an in-depth literature review of the elective surgery models, elective health strategies in practice and key enablers for change with regards to the elective procedures. Furthermore, we present a concept of using agent-based model (ABM) to simulate system dynamics of an elective surgery scheduling process. The model is validated by experimentations and altering parameters of the built model. As an outcome, the proposed model is capable of handling hospital resource utilization, time estimation of each case (surgery) from the waiting list and forecasting the scheduling of the surgeons.
