TY - JOUR PB - Elsevier UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211692312000380 KW - Surgical planning; Operating room scheduling; Master surgical schedule; Surgical case assignment SN - 2211-6923 JF - Operations Research for Health Care ID - eprints1425 Y1 - 2012/12// EP - 104 AV - public SP - 95 A1 - Agnetis, Alessandro A1 - Coppi, Alberto A1 - Corsini, Matteo A1 - Dellino, Gabriella A1 - Meloni, Carlo A1 - Pranzo, Marco IS - 4 N2 - This paper addresses Operating Room (OR) planning policies in elective surgery. In particular, we investigate long-term policies for determining the Master Surgical Schedule (MSS) throughout the year, analyzing the tradeoff between organizational simplicity, favored by an MSS that does not change completely every week, and quality of the service offered to the patients, favored by an MSS that dynamically adapts to the current state of waiting lists, the latter objective being related to a lean approach to hospital management. Surgical cases are selected from the waiting lists according to several parameters, including surgery duration, waiting time and priority class of the operations. We apply the proposed models to the operating theater of a public, medium-size hospital in Empoli, Italy, using Integer Linear Programming formulations, and analyze the scalability of the approach on larger hospitals. The simulations point out that introducing a very limited degree of variability in MSS in terms of OR sessions assignment can largely pay off in terms of resource efficiency and due date performance. TI - Long term evaluation of operating theater planning policies VL - 1 ER -