Effect of obesity and clinical factors on pre-incision time: study of operating room workflow.

As the obese population is increasing rapidly worldwide, there is more interest to study the different aspects of obesity and its impact especially on healthcare outcomes and health related issues. Targeting non-surgical times in the operating room (OR), this study focuses on the effect of obesity along with clinical factors on pre-incision times in OR. Specifically, both the individual and combined effect of clinical factors with obesity on pre-incision times is studied. Results show that with the confidence of 95%, pre-incision time in the OR of obese patients is significantly higher than those for non-obese patients by approximately five percent. Findings also show that more complex cases do not exhibit significant differences between these patient subgroups.