What is the average OR utilization (and cases per OR per day) in the United States?
The value is not known, nor can it be known, because operating room utilization cannot be measured accurately with sufficiently brief duration data sets as to be practical. There are three reasons. First, the surgical service refers to a group of surgeons who share allocated OR time. An individual surgeon, a group, a specialty, or a department can represent a surgical service. There is usually heterogeneity among services in their adjusted and raw utilization. Thus, the overall average utilization at a facility is of unclear importance. Second, for services that have been allocated one OR on some days of the week, the utilization cannot be measured accurately unless the value is too low or high as to be of no practical value (click here for the abstract or click here to download the full article). Third, for services that have been allocated two or more ORs on some days of the week, one such OR can have under-utilized OR time (i.e., adjusted utilization < 100%) while another such OR ha
