---
title: "Operating room schedules that surgeons follow"
description: "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?"
url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/operating-room-scheduling
markdown_url: https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/operating-room-scheduling.md
license: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)
share_text: "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."
date: "2026-10-23"
updated: "2026-10-23"
status: "seed"
tags: ["operations research", "healthcare"]
keywords: ["operating room scheduling", "operating room planning"]
---

# 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?

## 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.

## Related research activity

*The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26*

| Keyword | Papers, last 30 days | Rank | Papers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26* | Papers, last 36 months |
|---|---:|---:|---|---:|
| operating room scheduling | 1 | #2881 | 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 3, 2, 0, 0, 2, 3, 0, 1, 1, 3, 0, 0, 4, 1, 6, 0, 3, 1, 0, 2, 2, 0, 2, 0, 0, 3, 5, 1 | 49 |
| operating room planning | 0 | – | 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0 | 6 |

## 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

```bibtex
@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}
}
```

License: CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).