Documentation

Introduction

Three months ago we started with an ambitious project plan to build the first version of the operation theater (OT) module. In this first release we focused on scheduling surgeries as it is one of the most important activities in managing an OT. We have succeeded in building the foundation for further development by implementing a scalable automatic scheduling solution that is easily extensible.

Features

Final and midterm presentation videos both include a demonstration part that shows the implemented features.

• Midterm presentation
• Final presentation

Installation

to be added soon...

Configuration

• Location Tag
  This module introduces a new location tag “Operation Theater”. Locations that are tagged are used by this module and show up in the scheduling page

• Location attributes
  default start time and default end time: defines default available times for this location

• System property
  Automatic scheduler will only plan ahead a limited number of days. This window length is specified with the "operationtheater.continuousPlanningWindow" parameter.

Data Model

• Surgery table
  This is the main object that links to a patient, procedure, scheduling data and surgical team. Furthermore it stores the start end finish time of the surgery

• Procedure
  This table holds all necessary information that describes a procedure (name, description, intervention duration, operation theater preparation duration and the number of days the patient has to stay in the hospital after the surgery (not yet used).

• Scheduling data
  This table stores the solution that is calculated by the automatic scheduler (planned start and finish time as well as the planned operation theater and whether this surgery has been locked (a locked surgery can't be changed by the automatic scheduler)

• Surgical team
  This table is used to model the many-to-many relationship between surgeries and providers.

Automatic scheduler

A continuous planning approach has been chosen to keep the scheduling optimal. Once the current master schedule has been invalidated by an event (e.g. a surgery takes longer than estimated) it is recalculated. The last timetable is used as input for the scheduler who tries to re-optimize it, based on all changes.

...