A three level strategy for the design and performance evaluation of Hospital Departments: A case study

The increased demand for hospital services has saturated the capacity of Hospital Departments (HDs) that require suitable tools for the efficient management of resources and of flows of patients, staff, and drugs. The paper proposes a model based on a three level strategy to design at the tactical level a HD. The first module employs a Unified Modeling Language tool and a timed Petri net model to describe the flow of patients. The optimization module employs the fluid relaxation to concisely approximate in a continuous Petri net framework the HD model and optimize suitable performance indices. The simulation module verifies that the optimized parameters allow an effective workflow organization while maximizing the patient flow. A real case study on the pulmonology department of the general hospital of Bari (Italy) shows the efficiency of the proposed method.