A hospital admission planning model for emergency and elective patients under stochastic resource requirements and no-shows

Hospital admission planning plays an important role for managing and allocating hospital resources by emphasizing on an optimal use of operating theater time. The objective of this work is to develop a mixed integer linear programming model in order to minimize the total absolute deviations of the operating room resource utilizations from their target utilizations for the multiple-day planning horizon. The stochastic resource requirements such as length of stay, emergency arrivals, and unattended patients (no-shows) are considered in the proposed formulation. The mathematical model was tested with a sample data set. Results show that the deviations from the target resource utilizations are decreased by 0%, 3.18%, 0.45%, and 3.00% for each type of hospital resources; namely, operating theater time, intensive-care beds, intensive-care nursing staff and medium-care beds, respectively. Moreover, the gap deviated from the overall target resource utilization is improved by 1%.