Overview

For the past few decades, healthcare costs have been steadily increasing at an alarming rate. Hospitals have historically been large contributors to these rising costs. There are two sections of the hospital that contribute most to these rising costs—the emergency department and the operating room. The emergency department of any given hospital is generally considered the “money loser” of the hospital with the operating room being the “money maker.” Inefficiencies in both of these departments lead to large and potentially avoidable costs. For our project, we chose to focus on inefficiencies in operating room scheduling.

Improper utilization of the operating room in a hospital can lead to unnecessary problems such as wasted time and resources. Intuitively, wasted time and resources lead to unnecessary costs. On the flip side, if operating rooms can be optimized and utilized to the greatest capacity possible, cost savings can be tremendous since the operating room is the major source of revenue in almost every hospital.