Title: Bed management considering bed-blocking and elective patient admissions using simulation optimisation

Authors: Zahra Aghaabdellahian; Mehdi Bijari

Addresses: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, 84156-83111, Iran ' Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, 84156-83111, Iran

Abstract: Treatment process in health centres is mostly carried out in such a way that the patient is hospitalised in several parts of the wards during treatment. When patients are obliged to stay in a department until a bed becomes available in the next department, 'bed-blocking' occurs. Hospitals often suffer from the lack of proper planning and ineffective management of hospital beds and medical resources. In this research, we tackle this issue by introducing a multi-objective simulation optimisation model to determine the optimal number of elective admissions, the appropriate number of beds, and the number of patients who are forced to discharge in each ward. The model minimises hospital costs and the number of patients who are blocked. Due to the complexity of the issue, two meta-heuristic approaches are developed to solve the model. In this regard, five simulation optimisation algorithms have been implemented to solve the model and compare the results. By solving the presented algorithms, Pareto optimal frontiers are obtained in various states.

Keywords: hospital beds management; bed blocking; multi-objective simulation optimisation; meta heuristic.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSPM.2020.107330

International Journal of Simulation and Process Modelling, 2020 Vol.15 No.3, pp.278 - 294

Received: 23 Nov 2018
Accepted: 16 Aug 2019
Published online: 15 May 2020 *

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