Calculating a Potential Increase in Hospital Margin for Elective Surgery by Changing Operating Room Time Allocations or Increasing Nursing Staffing to Permit Completion of More Cases: A Case Study

Abstract

For hospitals where elective surgery caseload is limited by nursing recruitment, to increase one surgeon's operating room time either another surgeon's time must be decreased, nurses need to be paid a premium for working longer hours, or higher-priced "traveling" nurses can be contracted. Linear programming was performed using Microsoft Excel to estimate the effect of each of these interventions on hospital contribution margin.