Revenue Management Under Variable Resource Capacity Requirements and Importance Factor for Patient Classes in Hospitals

Abstract

Revenue Management (RM) is a subfield of Operations Research that aims at maximizing revenues acquired by selling products/services in a specified period to the right customers. In this paper we address the problem of optimal assignment of general surgery ward of operation room to different classes of surgeries, each of which requiring different surgery time, using revenue management mechanisms. Deciding about accepting or rejecting a surgery request is made beside the option of preserving capacity of the operation room for future valuable requests based on the adjusted revenue (via inclusion of importance levels derived from expert opinions by an AHP approach). Data in this study were collected from Sayad-e-Shirazi Hospital of GorGan city. For formulating the problem we develop contingency and deterministic dynamic programming algorithms. Besides, we also propose a heuristic method based on  a deterministic linear programming approach. The number of accepted requests for classes with higher financial priority using RM approach are compared with FCFS policy and results signify that a higher level of efficiency is attainable using the proposed RM approaches. The efficiency along with using different surgical importance levels in accepting requests is also investigated