One advantage of performing virtually identical cases—such as specialty ORs (cataract surgery would be an example) is that the room setup is virtually identical and a great deal of time can be saved (or avoided) by being able to put whichever patient and physician is ready into the next available room.  This is not used to full advantage when scheduling in most ORs.

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The lower orange bar is longer than the one above it, mostly because of the initial time for setup.  The additional time at the end of the case is clean-up time and can’t be optimized as readily.  In finance, you could value this as a real option….