Optimization of patient arrivals based on conditions

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Estephe DLDL asked Mar 18, '19 Cliff King commented Mar 28, '19

Optimization of patient arrivals based on conditions

Hello,

I am currently working on a simulation analysis and I need your help.

The objective is to schedule patients based on certain conditions and rule.

A patient has certain data and it needs to be taken into account to be scheduled :

An ESOP : early start of operation which means the first day of the week we can schedule the patients. (1=monday, 5=friday)
A LSOP : late start of operation which means the last day of the week we can schedule the patient
A number of anesthetists and nurses required for the full length of surgery
A surgery duration
A surgeon assigned to the operation
A room assigned for the operation. If possible I would like to use a binary table to also have the possibility to change the room assignment with specialized operating rooms and a specialty for an operation.

The objective will be to schedule patients based on these data and other basic conditions, such that the operating rooms are open from 8h00 to 16h00 (an operation can finish after, and if we don’t have the choice we can schedule a patient at 16h00 to be operated at 16h45 for example) and most important we want the longer operations, or shorter (depending of the model, both will be done), to be scheduled first.

Before I was working with an appointment table with a room assigned for a specific hour, but now the objective is to het this based on our conditions.

I feel that this is more an optimization problem than a simulation problem, but is it possible to do it on flexsim HC ?

The final objective is to check performance indicators such as average LOS, utilization of rooms, nurses etc.

You can find attached (beginning of the post) my basic model, with the data in the global table.

Thanks by advance,

Sincerely

Software Version:

FlexSim HC 5.3.10

operation room

test-optimization-arrival.fsm (968.4 KiB)

Answer 1 · 2019-03-18T23:28:19Z

Cliff King answered Mar 18, '19 Cliff King commented Mar 28, '19

A closely related topic was discussed a couple years ago on this site that you might find interesting. Take a look at what was said and the the sample model I uploaded at the end of the thread, and let me know what your thoughts are! https://answers.flexsim.com/questions/32789/advice-needed-healthcare-or-suite.html

Cliff

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Estephe DLDL commented · Mar 24, 2019 at 01:47 PM

I have read the thread, and opened every file to understand better. It is really interesting and it is close to what I would like to achieve. One problem is that with my student licence the model is too big so I think I don't have access to the moel finally cause when I try to look at the excel import, the SPTF formulation, how it is set, I don't have anything.
I don't know if it is because of my licence or because it is somewhere else but I don't know where then.
My model is much simpler, because we only focus on operating rooms, the patient comes in, he goes in the room and the surgeon and staff comes, operation occurs and then he leaves.
It is close to what you did but in a simpler way. Problem is that I have different constraints, such as availability days for the patient and the surgeon. My problem is based on a week and not a single day. I don't know if since then you have went further in order to achieve a week or not ?

Thanks

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Cliff King Estephe DLDL commented · Mar 27, 2019 at 01:34 PM

I never did take that model any further to include more than a single day. Including constraints such as availability days for patients and surgeons would indeed make the scheduling problem more challenging. I really don't know how you would solve this problem without writing all the code yourself for the scheduling piece.

In the following post, I attached an example model at the end of it called "dynamically-fill-appt-slots-daily.fsm" where I used flexscript code to manipulate the patient Appointments Table dynamically that could give you some useful tips as well

https://answers.flexsim.com/questions/61817/how-to-create-random-arrival-schedules-with-fixed.html?childToView=62621#answer-62621

Good luck!

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Cliff King Cliff King commented · Mar 27, 2019 at 01:47 PM

Also, the script that builds the patient arrivals schedule in the PreOp-OR-PACU model can be found in the Post Import Code editor of the Excel Import/Export Interface. I've attached a text file of the code if for some reason you still can't access it from within the model.

postimportcode.txt

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postimportcode.txt (18.9 KiB)

2019-03-27-7-47-35.jpg (535.5 KiB)

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