A decision support service for hospital bed assignment

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in problems related to health facilities. Many authors proposed decision-support approaches to increase efficiency within hospital departments. An efficient use of healthcare resources reduces medical costs and provides better service to users. In this paper, we address patient admission scheduling problems, that consist in deciding which patient to admit, at what time and which room is assigned. Rooms have several characteristics and a limited capacity. These problems are very similar to those addressed in manufacturing process environments. Patients are similar to jobs with a processing time (length of stay), a start date, a due date, and they have to be assigned to an equipped machine (room) in a well-defined planning horizon. Overcrowded rooms are not allowed. Taking into account that a constraint on the maximum number of patients accommodated in every room is imposed, the authors propose an optimization model to make best use of the available resources. The proposed model is based on the initial assumption that the information is available in advance (offline approach). It is tested on a set of instances. Results are represented and discussed.