Patient admission, surgery planning and bed assignments problems: a solution approach

Elective patient admission and surgery planning with bed assignment is a very challenging problem, recently introduced in the literature. Its main aim is to find a good matching between demand and resource, namely bed, equipment, and operating rooms. It is an extension of the patient bed assignment problems, which is NP-hard. Our contribution to the existing literature is a matheuristic solution approach, which can improve the ability of hospitals to provide the best possible care to patients. Computational experiments on bench- mark instances show that the proposed approach provides high-quality schedules in reasonable times and the results reported in the literature are improved.