CASE STUDY
Rather than focusing only on patients at the top of the waiting list, the model could evaluate a wider pool of candidates while simultaneously considering clinical, staffing, operatingroom and recovery constraints.
The resulting plan reached 331 procedures per week, compared with 267 under the hospital ' s existing process.
The model also identified something less obvious: the dominant constraint was not necessarily the number of operating rooms or cleaning crews. It was the timing and coordination of recovery-bed capacity.
If the bottleneck is misunderstood, adding infrastructure may not solve the problem. An additional operating room, for example, is of limited value if the recovery unit cannot absorb the resulting patients.
“ The preliminary results, obtained in simulated scenarios using the data available, indicate potential improvements of close to 30 % in planning capacity compared with traditional approaches, and provide us with a much richer quantitative basis to analyse and evolve our resource-management methodology, although still within an exploratory setting,” said Rafa Luque, Nursing Coordinator of the Surgical Process & Sterilisation, Hospital del Mar.
The quantum question comes later
Today ' s classical optimisation tools can handle the Hospital del Mar problem at its current scale.
So why quantum?
Classical computers can solve many optimisation problems remarkably well, but eventually there are cases where finding a sufficiently good solution within an operationally useful timeframe becomes difficult.
Quantum computers are being developed partly with such optimisation problems in mind. Whether they will deliver a practical advantage for this particular application – and when – remains an open research question.
They cannot wait for the hardware to arrive before figuring out what to do with it.
“ Projects like this are essential to understanding where quantum technologies can create real value in optimization tasks. Since the scale and timing of this impact are still uncertain, we believe it is crucial to start early and collaborate closely with domain experts,” said Jordi Riu, Algorithm Portfolio PO, Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech.
A quantum strategy that starts without a quantum computer
Instead of starting with the technology and searching for a problem, Hospital del Mar started with a problem it already had.
Hospital del Mar and Qilimanjaro are now exploring how the optimisation framework could move closer to day-to-day clinical planning, including integration with real workflows and live patient data.
But the experiment has already established something valuable: the hospital knows what it wants to optimise, has a mathematical representation of the problem, has identified its key constraint and has a way to measure the result.
Not a futuristic machine sitting in a data centre.
A well-defined problem, backed by good data, waiting for a computer powerful enough to solve it. •
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