Hospital Beds Reallocation using Mathematical Programming
While the demand of hospital’s inpatient-beds by medical specialties changes according to patient volume over time, the supply of beds remains relatively fixed as dictated by the infrastructure. With no adjustments to the allocation of beds to the specialties, the growing mismatch could result in unnecessary overflow, redundant traveling by the doctors and longer bed wait time. Hence there is a need to review the bed allocation periodically. A two-stage integer programming model was used to examine the bed allocation problem in a restructured (public) acute care general hospital in Singapore. The first stage optimization decided the number of beds by room configurations (e.g. private, semi-private and wards) to be fairly reallocated to each medical specialty. The second stage optimization incorporated operational considerations like physical spanning (which will affect the travel time for the clinicians), nurses’ training and existence of specialized equipment in the assignment of beds to physical locations. The advantages of using mathematical programming are their objectivity, declarative nature and suitability for the simultaneous consideration of multiple constraints. The optimization results showed a potential improvement of bed matching by 3.4％ and reduction in physical spread by 6％-20％.
Health Services Mathematical Programming Bed Allocation
Kiok Liang TEOW Woan Shin TAN
National Healthcare Group,Singapore
国际会议
北京
英文
2007-05-30（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）