Reducing Patient Waiting Time at an Ambulatory Surgical Center

Introduction

This chapter describes a methodology that reduces patient waiting time in a for-profit ambulatory surgical center. Patients in this facility are scheduled in advance for the various operations, and yet operations start late, or last longer than expected creating undesired delays. The facility is of small size having the potential capacity of 30 hours of surgery scheduled in any given day.

Currently, surgeries are scheduled by a scheduler using the “block” scheduling approach. Although the facility is limited to ambulatory surgery, we counted about 300 different surgery types, with a staff of quite a few surgeons. Using the block scheduling approach each group of doctors who utilizes the surgery center are assigned one or more half-day blocks in which they can schedule any procedure at anytime, given that no other doctor is using that time slot. As the doctors call in and request an operation room, the scheduling nurse allots an amount of time for each surgery based on previous experience. However, the combinations of surgeries and physicians are quite large, adding to the variability that is a part of the process, making the nurse’s estimates quite inaccurate.

The objective of this chapter is to present a method that will create a more accurate scheduling by increasing the accuracy of the operations’ time estimates, reducing the variability in the operations and sequencing the operations in a more effective manner.