The German Association of OP Management (VOPM) convenes every year for its annual meeting in Bremen to present and discuss the latest developments on the interface of medicine, organization, and human resource management. In this year, VOPM invited the project “IBOSS – Information-Based Optimization of Surgery Schedules” to give a talk about the “Optimization of Surgery Schedules”. IBOSS is a collaborative research project in the Mathematics Research Program of the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), associated with the MedLab of the Research Campus MODAL, in which Freie Universität Berlin, Universität Paderborn, and Zuse Institute Berlin partner with Charité and VOPM to develop new data driven methods for the optimization of surgery schedules under consideration of several conflicting objectives. The idea is to derive more reliable estimates of surgery durations by a detailed analysis of clinical and process data, such that unproductive waiting times and overtime work can be minimized. This improves the quality of the medical treatment as well as employee satisfaction and it reduces costs. Alexander Tesch introduced the audience to the project and the theory developed so far, and showed the stage of development of the associated planning tool (see the photo).
Link to IBOSS:
http://www.zib.de/projects/information-based-optimization-surgery-schedules