From Algorithms to Action: Using a Hospital Digital Twin to Close the Gap Between Optimization and Implementation

March 24th, 2026

Hospitals routinely cancel procedures for lack of beds, place patients off-service, and divert patients on days that end with empty beds. Other industries offer lessons on how to tackle these problems with optimization. I'll share three examples from our Digital Twin at Stanford Medicine Children's Health. We simulated and pre-emptively cancelled deploying a cardiovascular surgical scheduling tools that wouldn't have worked. We used simulation to design and deploy a surgical scheduling algorithm now in use for over five years. We built LUCILE, a Claude-based chat interface to let doctors, nurses, and administrators use advanced optimization tools.

David Scheinker, PhD

David Scheinker is a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine. He is the Founder and Director of SURF Stanford Medicine, a group that brings together students and faculty from the university with clinicians and administrators from hospitals to improve the quality of care using operations research methodology. SURF has implemented and published dozens of projects demonstrating improvements to the quality and efficiency of care. His areas of focus include clinical care delivery, technical improvements to hospital operations, sensor-based and algorithm-enabled telemedicine, and the socioeconomic factors that shape healthcare cost and quality. David was previously a Joint Research Fellow at The MIT Sloan School of Management and Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a PhD in theoretical math from The University of California San Diego under Jim Agler. He advises Carta Healthcare, a healthcare analytics company started by former Stanford students.