Determining the Optimal Configuration of Hospital Inpatient Rooms in the Presence of Isolation Patients

Edieal Pinker () and Tolga Tezcan ()
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Edieal Pinker: School of Management, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06511
Tolga Tezcan: Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627

Operations Research, 2013, vol. 61, issue 6, 1259-1276

Abstract: We study the optimal configuration of hospital inpatient rooms with private and semiprivate rooms when some of the patients have infectious diseases and need to be isolated. We assume that the demand is random and seasonal. We propose a computationally efficient solution procedure that is based on a stochastic program that uses asymptotic approximations for the system performance under different admission policies and show its accuracy for large systems. Using our model, we study the appropriateness of the recent trends in hospital design calling for 100% private rooms. We show that even with isolation patients such an extreme approach could result in a significant degradation in the access of patients to hospital beds.

Keywords: hospital bed configuration; queueing theory; admission control; hospital operations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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