Scheduling hospital services: the efficacy of elective-surgery quotas

We take advantage of the advance-scheduling property for elective surgeries by exploring whether the use of a daily quota system with a 1-week or 2-week scheduling window would improve the performance of a typical intensive care unit (ICU) that serves patients coming from a number of different sources within the hospital. The exploration is carried out via a simulation model whose parameters are established from actual ICU data that were gathered over a 6-month period. It is shown that formally linking one controllable upstream process, namely the scheduling of elective surgeries through a quota system, to the downstream ICU admission process, can have beneficial effects throughout the hospital. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.