Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods for estimating surgery duration

Abstract

Developing prediction bounds for surgery duration is difficult due to the large number of distinct procedures. The variety of procedures at a multi-speciality surgery suite means that even with several years of historical data a large fraction of surgical cases will have little or no historical data for use in predicting case duration. Bayesian methods can be used to combine historical data with expert judgement to provide estimates to overcome this, but eliciting expert opinion for a probability distribution can be difficult. We combine expert judgement, expert classification of procedures by complexity category and historical data in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo model and test it against one year of actual surgery cases at a multi-speciality surgical suite.