On the morning of July 10, 2018, a cook at K2 Base Camp in Pakistan was looking through his binoculars toward Broad Peak when he spotted something that looked like a body about 2,000 feet below the summit. The cook shared his discovery with Bartek Bargiel and his brother Andrzrej, members of a Polish expedition hoping to make the first ski descent of K2, the world's second-highest mountain. At first, the Poles thought they were looking at a corpse. But after more careful study they realized that it was a man in distress, clinging to the side of the mountain with an ice axe. There was no communication between the teams in the two separate base camps, so the Poles immediately dispatched one of their teammates, who took off running to the other camp, which was five miles down-glacier.

Operating rooms are a precious resource. They may account for 50 percent of a hospital's revenues and cost as much as $80 a minute. But figuring out how much time to allot for a surgery is a challenge every hospital faces. OR scheduling is a $5 billion problem. To optimize the OR, you have to answer a fundamental question: How long does each surgery take?. Underutilization means fewer patients get surgical care and the hospital has excess capacity.