Bed Occupancy Optimization

Nowadays university hospitals become more and more interested in operations research. Within a hospital all medical departments are connected by some process. One of those processes is the care wards provide to patients. While providing this care, a patient occupies a hospital bed; those beds are scarce. There is a clear tradeoff between the occupancy level and ward availability. The more beds, the lower the occupancy and the higher the availability. We describe the idea of increasing the occupancy while maintaining the same availability, by combining wards. To estimate the occupancy and ward availability we developed a model that not only uses the patient arrival rate, but also includes the patient bed requirements (i.e. a patient requiring multiple beds).