Bi-criteria evaluation of an outpatient procedure center via simulation

Surgical services require the coordination of many activities, including patient check-in and surgical preparation, surgery, and recovery after surgery. Each of these activities requires the availability of resources including staff, operating rooms, and intake and recovery beds. Furthermore, each of these activities has substantial uncertainty in their duration. The combination of a complex resource constrained environment, and uncertainty in the duration of activities, creates challenging scheduling problems. In this study we report on a discrete event simulation model of an outpatient surgical suite, and investigate the impact of several sequencing and scheduling heuristics on competing performance criteria.