Intelligent OR planning

Artificial intelligence (AI) is opening up completely new possibilities in all industries. UNITY has transferred this potential for change into a concrete application case in the healthcare industry. For the clinics in the Hôpitaux Robert Schuman Group,  surgery planning is a signifcant lever in continuous process improvement.  Prior to each operation, many steps that determine daily objectives need to be conducted manually such as telephone confimations, data entry and rescheduling. This resulted in differences in planning, overtime and a suboptimal use of expensive resources in the OR. In a project with the UNITY Innovation Alliance, artificial intelligence was introduced into OR planning to automate planning processes. UNITY’s task was to define an innovative and efficient process. The requirements that were derived by UNITY were then transferred to Next Data Service for further agile development. The OR planning was then realized by using a combination of algorithms. Rule-based systems and neural networks determined the framework conditions for each operation. These could then be combined with an evolutionary algorithm to create the best possible OR plan. For each operation, artificial intelligence was used to optimize the necessary resources, calculate probabilities for ad-hoc planned emergencies and necessary buffer times as well as the actual duration of the surgery. This occurred continuously in real-time so that the operating room personnel always had a current OR plan available. More than 100 factors flowed into operating room planning – a number so great that made it impossible for any one person to oversee it. Patients profit from this by having OR appointments that are reliable and planned as best as possible. Employees also profit from reliablyplanned work hours and optimally managed OR utilization.