Abstract
Resource coordination in surgical scheduling remains challenging in health care delivery systems. This is especially the case in highly-specialized settings such as coordinating Intraoperative Neurophysiologic Monitoring (IONM) resources. Inefficient coordination yields higher costs, limited access to care, and creates constraints to surgical quality and outcomes. To maximize utilization of IONM resources, optimization-based algorithms are proposed to effectively schedule IONM surgical cases and technologists and evaluate staffing needs. Data with 10 days of case volumes, their surgery durations, and technologist staffing was used to demonstrate method effectiveness. An iterative optimization-based model that determines both optimal surgery and technologist start time (operational scenario 4) was built in an Excel spreadsheet along with Excel’s Solver settings. It was compared with current practice (operational scenario 1) and optimization solution on only surgery start time (operational scenario 2) or technologist start time (operational scenario 3). Comparisons are made with respect to technologist overtime and under-utilization time. The results conclude that scenario 4 significantly reduces overtime by 74% and under-utilization time by 86% as well as technologist needs by 10%. For practices that do not have flexibility to alter surgeon preference on surgery start time or IONM technologist staffing levels, both scenarios 2 and 3 also result in substantial reductions in technologist overtime and under-utilization. Moreover, IONM technologist staffing options are discussed to accommodate technologist preferences and set constraints for surgical case scheduling. All optimization-based approaches presented in this paper are able to improve utilization of IONM resources and ultimately improve the coordination and efficiency of highly-specialized resources.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Gary Fanjiang, Jerome H Grossman, W Dale Compton, Proctor P Reid, et al. Building a better delivery system: a new engineering/health care partnership. National Academies Press, 2005.
Kathryn M McDonald, Vandana Sundaram, Dena M Bravata, Robyn Lewis, Nancy Lin, Sally A Kraft, Moira McKinnon, Helen Paguntalan, and Douglas K Owens. Closing the quality gap: a critical analysis of quality improvement strategies (vol. 7: Care coordination). 2007.
Thomas Bodenheimer. Coordinating care-a perilous journey through the health care system. New England Journal of Medicine, 358(10):1064, 2008.
Matthew J Press. Instant replay—a quarterback’s view of care coordination. New England Journal of Medicine, 371(6):489–491, 2014.
Gary Kaplan, Marianne Hamilton Lopez, J Michael McGinnis, et al. Getting to now. In Transforming Health Care Scheduling and Access: Getting to Now. National Academies Press (US), 2015.
Alan D Legatt. Intraoperative neurophysiologic monitoring. In Clinical Anesthesia in Neuro- surgery, pages 63–127. Elsevier, 1991.
Sudhakar Vadivelu, Ahilan Sivaganesan, Akash J Patel, Satish Agadi, Robert J Schmidt, Prasitha Mani, and Andrew Jea. Practice trends in the utilization of intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring in pediatric neurosurgery as a function of complication rate, and patient-, surgeon-, and procedure-related factors. World Neurosurg, 81(3–4):617–623, 2014.
Arvydas A Tamkus, Kent S Rice, and Michael T McCaffrey. Quality assurance and performance improvement in intraoperative neurophysiologic monitoring programs. Neurodiagnostic Journal, 53(1):46–57, 2012.
Marc R Nuwer, Bruce H Cohen, and Katie M Shepard. Practice patterns for intraoperative neurophysiologic monitoring. Neurology, 80(12):1156–1160, 2013.
Jeffrey H Gertsch, Joseph J Moreira, George R Lee, John D Hastings, Eva Ritzl, Matthew A Eccher, Bernard A Cohen, Jay L Shils, Michael T McCaffrey, Gene K Balzer, Jeffrey R Balzer, Willy Boucharel, Lanjun Guo, Leah L Hanson, Laura B Hemmer, Faisal R Jahangiri, Jorge A Mendez Vigil, Richard W Vogel, Lawrence R Wierzbowski, Bryan Wilent, James S Zuccaro, Charles D Yingling, and membership of the ASNM. Practice guidelines for the supervising professional: intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring. Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing, 33(2):175–183, 2019.
Lieberman Hillier and Gerald J Lieberman. Introduction to operations research, 1980.
William Crown, Nasuh Buyukkaramikli, Praveen Thokala, Alec Morton, Mustafa Y Sir, Deborah A Marshall, Jon Tosh, William V Padula, Maarten J Ijzerman, Peter K Wong, et al. Constrained optimization methods in health services research — an introduction: report 1 of the ispor optimization methods emerging good practices task force. Value in health, 20(3):310–319, 2017.
Muge Capan, Anahita Khojandi, Brian T Denton, Kimberly D Williams, Turgay Ayer, Jagpreet Chhatwal, Murat Kurt, Jennifer Mason Lobo, Mark S Roberts, Greg Zaric, et al. From data to improved decisions: Operations research in healthcare delivery. Medical Decision Making, 37(8):849–859, 2017.
Yu-Li Huang, Alan H Bryce, Tracy Culbertson, Sarah L Connor, Sherry A Looker, Kristin M Altman, James G Collins, Winston Stellner, Robert R McWilliams, Alvaro Moreno-Aspitia, Sikander Ailawadhi, and Ruben A Mesa. Alternative outpatient chemotherapy scheduling method to improve patient service quality and nurse satisfaction. Journal of Oncology Practice, 14(2):82–91, 2018.
Lim, G. J., Mobasher, A., Kardar, L., & Cote, M. J. Nurse scheduling. In Handbook of healthcare system scheduling (pp. 31–64). Springer, Boston, MA, 2012.
Cardoen, B., Demeulemeester, E., & Beliën, J. Operating room planning and scheduling: A literature review. European Journal of Operational Research. 201(3):921–932, 2010.
Beliën, J., & Demeulemeester, E. A branch-and-price approach for integrating nurse and surgery scheduling. European Journal of Operational Research. 189(3):652–668, 2008.
Lim, G. J., Mobasher, A., Bard, J. F., & Najjarbashi, A. Nurse scheduling with lunch break assignments in operating suites. Operations Research for Health Care, 10:35–48, 2016.
Neyshabouri, S., & Berg, B. P. Two-stage robust optimization approach to elective surgery and downstream capacity planning. European Journal of Operational Research. 260(1): 21–40, 2017.
Bam, M., Denton, B. T., Van Oyen, M. P., & Cowen, M. E. Surgery scheduling with recovery resources. IISE Transactions. 49(10):942–955, 2017.
Shehadeh, K. S., & Padman, R. Stochastic optimization approaches for elective surgery scheduling with downstream capacity constraints: Models, challenges, and opportunities. Computers & Operations Research. 137:105523, 2022.
Huang, Y. L., Bansal, A., Berg, B., Sanvick, C., Klavetter, E. W., Sandhu, G. S., & Greason, K. L. An Algorithm for Pairing Interventionalists and Surgeons for the TAVR Procedure. Journal of Medical Systems. 45(4):1–9, 2021.
Calegari, R., Fogliatto, F. S., Lucini, F. R., Anzanello, M. J., & Schaan, B. D. Surgery scheduling heuristic considering OR downstream and upstream facilities and resources. BMC Health Services Research. 20(1):1–11, 2020.
Daniel Fylstra, Leon Lasdon, John Watson, and Allan Waren. Design and use of the microsoft excel solver. Interfaces. 28(5):29–55, 1998.
S Ayca Erdogan and Brian T Denton. Surgery planning and scheduling. Wiley encyclopedia of operations research and management science, 2010.
Diwakar Gupta. Surgical suites’ operations management. Production and Operations Management. 16(6):689–700, 2007.
Jerrold H May, William E Spangler, David P Strum, and Luis G Vargas. The surgical scheduling problem: Current research and future opportunities. Production and Operations Management. 20(3):392–405, 2011.
Eric Marcon and Franklin Dexter. Impact of surgical sequencing on post anesthesia care unit staffing. Health Care Management Science. 9(1):87–98, 2006.
Eric Marcon and Franklin Dexter. An observational study of surgeons’ sequencing of cases and its impact on postanesthesia care unit and holding area staffing requirements at hospitals. Anesthesia & Analgesia. 105(1):119–126, 2007.
Brian Denton, James Viapiano, and Andrea Vogl. Optimization of surgery sequencing and scheduling decisions under uncertainty. Health Care Management Science. 10(1):13–24, 2007.
Franklin Dexter, Richard H Epstein, and H Michael Marsh. A statistical analysis of weekday operating room anesthesia group staffing costs at nine independently managed surgical suites. Anesthesia & Analgesia. 92(6):1493–1498, 2001.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Declaration of Competing Interest
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The authors have no conflicts of interest regarding this study.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Implementation Science & Operations Management
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Huang, YL., Bansal, A., Berg, B.P. et al. Coordination of Intraoperative Neurophysiologic Monitoring Technologist and Surgery Schedules. J Med Syst 46, 67 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-022-01855-7
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-022-01855-7