Operating Room Scheduling with Tinderbox

Brian Gregory uses Tinderbox to explore operating room scheduling.

Operating rooms are expensive assets; you don’t want them sitting idle when people need them. Each room may be equipped differently; you want to schedule procedures in the most appropriate room. To complicate matters, some procedures require special equipment that takes time to move from place to place. You don’t want to haul a ton of equipment across the hospital if you don’t have to, and it’s good to preposition things at your leisure, rather than having everyone wait while someone fetches a cart from storage.

Dr. Gregory combines the Tinderbox map view, which provides a convenient spatial perspective with just the right level of abstraction, with Tinderbox timelines. The timelines show conflicts and bottlenecks, and the map view helps the staff figure our where things should go and where people should be.