A systems approach for hospital inpatient bed capacity planning

Evaluating best strategies across the organization has been a major challenge for healthcare decision makers. The complex nature of patient flow and the unpredictability involved makes discrete event simulation an ideal tool for evaluating strategic decisions in hospital inpatient capacity planning. In this paper, simulation was used to evaluate scenarios pertaining to hospital inpatient capacities. The requirement of additional capacities over the planning horizon was modeled and evaluated. Similarly, the impacts of the opening of a new competing hospital facility were studied.