A Stochastic Programming Approach for Appointment Scheduling Under Limited Availability of Surgery Turnover Teams

The number and availability of turnover teams may significantly affect the performance of a surgery schedule. We propose a two-stage stochastic integer programming formulation for setting the patient appointment times for surgeries under limited availability of turnover teams. We assume that a surgery schedule has already been created, and study how the schedule may be refined. We consider the durations of surgical operation and turnover to be random variables. The objective is to minimize the competing criteria of expected patient waiting time and operating room idle time. We discuss an implementation of a heuristic to generate near-optimal surgery schedules. We conduct numerical experiments using data from a large hospital. We compare the heuristic with a well-known and practical procedure used in earlier studies for setting patient appointment times for surgeries. Finally, we evaluate the impact of the number of turnover teams into the surgery schedules with respect to performance criteria of interest.