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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

Operating room schedules that surgeons follow

Operating room scheduling and planning appear on 16 recent papers in the operations research journals, among 52 surgery-related papers, most of which are AI work on surgical images. Hospitals rarely implement the optimized schedules. What stops them, and do the schedules survive surgeons' preferences and emergencies?

operations researchhealthcare

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 52 papers carry a surgery or operating-room keyword (32 in AI journals, 14 in operations research): "operating room scheduling" on 13, "surgical navigation" on 7, "surgical planning" on 4, "operating room planning" on 3. The scheduling papers are methods papers; implementation and its obstacles are rarely their subject.

Questions#

  • In hospitals that implemented optimized block schedules, how much did utilization and overtime change, and how much of the gain survived after a year?
  • How do surgeon preferences, emergency cases and turnover times, which the models simplify, erode the plans?
  • Would models that schedule for robustness against duration uncertainty be adopted more readily than those that maximize utilization?

Data that could help#

Operating room logs with planned and actual times from hospitals that adopted scheduling tools, and interviews with surgical managers.

Next step#

Partner with a hospital that adopted a scheduling tool and compare planned and actual utilization in the year before and after adoption.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
operating room scheduling1#288149
operating room planning0–6

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/operating-room-scheduling.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Operating room schedules that surgeons follow. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/operating-room-scheduling

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-operating-room-scheduling,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Operating room schedules that surgeons follow},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/operating-room-scheduling}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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