Laboratory of Decisions Engineering for Health Care Delivery, Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems, University of Calabria, Rende Cosenza, Italy.
Health Care Manag Sci. 2011 Mar;14(1):74-88. doi: 10.1007/s10729-010-9144-5. Epub 2010 Nov 18.
Week Hospital is an innovative inpatient health care organization and management, by which hospital stay services are planned in advance and delivered on week-time basis to elective patients. In this context, a strategic decision is the optimal clinical management of patients, and, in particular, devising efficient and effective admission and scheduling procedures, by tackling different requirements such as beds' availability, diagnostic resources, and treatment capabilities. The main aim is to maximize the patient flow, by ensuring the delivery of all clinical services during the week. In this paper, the optimal management of Week Hospital patients is considered. We have developed and validated an innovative integer programming model, based on clinical resources allocation and beds utilization. In particular, the model aims at scheduling Week Hospital patients' admission/discharge, possibly reducing the length of stay on the basis of an available timetable of clinical services. The performance of the model has been evaluated, in terms of efficiency and robustness, by considering real data coming from a Week Hospital Rheumatology Division. The experimental results have been satisfactory and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
周医院是一种创新的住院医疗组织和管理模式，通过该模式，择期患者的住院服务将提前规划并在周内提供。在这种情况下，一个战略决策是对患者进行最佳的临床管理，特别是通过解决床位可用性、诊断资源和治疗能力等不同需求，设计高效和有效的入院和调度程序。主要目标是通过确保在一周内提供所有临床服务来最大化患者流量。本文考虑了周医院患者的最佳管理。我们已经开发并验证了一种基于临床资源分配和床位利用的创新整数规划模型。特别是，该模型旨在安排周医院患者的入院/出院，可能会根据可用的临床服务时间表来缩短住院时间。通过考虑来自周医院风湿病科的实际数据，从效率和稳健性方面评估了模型的性能。实验结果令人满意，证明了所提出方法的有效性。
