Modeling and optimization of resources in multi-emergency department settings with patient transfer

Publication date: Available online 8 June 2016 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Nasim Nezamoddini, Mohammad T. Khasawneh The increasing number of non-emergency patients in emergency departments (EDs) and long wait times caused by their overcrowding are some of the main concerns in health systems research. If an ED reaches an overcrowding state, there may be a need to transfer patients to other hospitals, which may or not belong to the same hospital system. Therefore, this paper investigates the effect of transferring non-emergency patients to other hospitals in multi-hospital settings. The strategy of transferring patients between hospitals can be used to minimize patient wait times without increasing the number of required resources. In this research, hospital capacity allocation is modeled using capacitated network design models, wherein transferring patients between hospitals is allowed. To investigate the effect of various system parameters, a comprehensive set of experiments are conducted for the proposed integer programming model. The experimental results showed that transferring patients is an effective way to decrease the number of patients waiting, especially in cases when minimum overlap exists in peak demand times of hospitals or when there is high uncertainty in the rate of patient arrivals. The experiments proved that the proposed patient transfer strategy can reduce the number of patients waiting by up to 35%. It was also shown that ...
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research