Analytical Approaches to Surgical Unit Management

Mr. Mohammad Mehdi Ghotboddini, a doctoral student at McGill University in the CREATE program, will be presenting his thesis proposal entitled:

Analytical Approaches to Surgical Unit Management

DATE: Monday, March 30, 2015

TIME: 12:00 noon

REVISED LOCATION: Bronfman Building – Room 245  (1001 Sherbrooke St., West)

Chair of the student's committee:    Prof. Vedat Verter

Faculty members and doctoral students are cordially invited to attend.

ABSTRACT

In this dissertation, we focus on the surgical unit management problem, which involves the integrated management of surgical wards and operating theaters.  We start by presenting a comprehensive literature review of the essential operational issues in a surgical unit. Then, we develop a Monte-Carlo simulation model to evaluate possible configurations of the surgical unit under various bed management policies, classified as dedicated policy, pooling policy, and partial-pooling policy. This simulation model is validated at Montreal Jewish General Hospital (JGH) and is presented as a decision support tool for the top management.  At the core of this work is an integrated approach to the surgical case mix problem (SCMP) so as to reduce surgical case cancellations due to bed unavailability as well as and the “costs” associated with rescheduling surgical procedures. To this end, we incorporate the strategic decisions with the tactical/operational decisions in a single stochastic model. We also study the effect of several governmental reimbursement mechanisms on SCMP outcomes. We use data from JGH to calibrate and adopt a modified Sample Average Approximation technique to solve the developed model. This analytical framework could be used for aligning the best interests of hospital administrators, surgeons, and patients, and hence provides a means gathering buy-in from the stakeholders concerning the proposed policies for surgical unit management.   Finally, we provide a set of proposed tasks to be undertaken prior to the completion of this dissertation.