Matching Patients with Surgeons: Heterogeneous Effects of Surgical Volume on Surgery Duration.

This article investigates how patient-specific information can be leveraged to improve hospital operational efficiency by examining the heterogeneous effects of surgical volume—defined as a surgeon’s recent experience with a procedure—on surgery duration in abdominal surgeries. Using data from a major Midwestern U.S. teaching hospital, the study applies an instrumental variable (IV) forest approach to estimate patient-specific volume effects while addressing endogeneity and high-dimensional feature interactions. Results show that surgical volume significantly reduces surgery duration on average, but the magnitude of this effect varies across patients, with patient-specific matching to surgeons potentially reducing total surgery time by 2.5% to 8.9%. An optimization model demonstrates that incorporating these heterogeneous effects into patient-surgeon assignments can yield meaningful operational improvements, though no significant effects of surgical volume on health outcomes like mortality or complications were found.