Scheduling Patients in Emergency Department by Considering Material Resources

Health organizations are complex to manage due to their dynamic processes and distributed hospital organization. It is therefore necessary for healthcare institutions to focus on this issue to deal with patients' requirements. Preparing a schedule for patients in the emergency department is a complex task, which requires taking into account numerous rules, related to various aspects: respect the triage process (emergency degrees of patients), respect the availability of resources, etc. In this paper, we present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) approach to facilitate this task. The objective is to minimize the total waiting time of patient's in the emergency department. We consider simultaneously four patients' process: registration and triage, consultation, treatment and hospitalization. The model is characterized by the availability of both human (triage staff, physician, nurse) and material resources (bed) in each process through the stay of patient in the ED except for triage and registration which does not require a bed. To solve this model, we used the commercial solver IBM ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio. The program has been tested on a set of instances. Numerical results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the efficiency of emergency department by reducing the total waiting time of patients.