Surgery scheduling heuristic considering OR downstream and upstream facilities and resources.

Background: Surgical theater (ST) operations planning is a key subject in the healthcare management literature, particularly the scheduling of procedures in operating rooms (ORs). The OR scheduling problem is usually approached using mathematical modeling and made available to ST managers through dedicated software. Regardless of the large body of knowledge on the subject, OR scheduling models rarely consider the integration of OR downstream and upstream facilities and resources or validate their propositions in real life, rather using simulated scenarios.

Forecasting Daily Volume and Acuity of Patients in the Emergency Department.

This study aimed at analyzing the performance of four forecasting models in predicting the demand for medical care in terms of daily visits in an emergency department (ED) that handles high complexity cases, testing the influence of climatic and calendrical factors on demand behavior. We tested different mathematical models to forecast ED daily visits at Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre (HCPA), which is a tertiary care teaching hospital located in Southern Brazil. Model accuracy was evaluated using mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), considering forecasting horizons of 1, 7, 14, 21, and 30 days.