The use of simulation for process improvement at an ambulatory surgery center

The work presented has the objective of building a simulation model to evaluate different alternatives for operation of a projected center for ambulatory surgery. For the construction of the model, a group of pathologies was selected and real data was taken from statistics of surgeries from a clinical hospital. The information was supplemented by the opinion of medical surgeons and expert anesthesiologists. Similarly, the model was validated by means of the opinion of experts and implemented with the Arena simulation software. Different configurations of operating conditions were studied. It is concluded that the maximum throughput of daily surgeries is achieved, 10 in total, dedicating two beds to preparation of patient, five beds to the transitory hospitalization and using an LPT scheduling rule in the operating rooms, i.e., the heaviest surgeries first.