Modelling and Solving Patient Admission and Hospital Stay Problems

This paper considers patient admissions and patient-to-room assignment problems, which are attracting increasing attention. These problems are challenging and concern with the assignment of a set of patients to a set of rooms in a well-defined planning horizon by satisfying several constraints. Hospitals usually face this complex problem of planning admissions and assigning patients to rooms manually, requiring long staff time and high costs. The aim of this paper is to model and solve this problem efficiently. The proposed optimization model is embedded in a matheuristic, which is tested to solve a set of benchmark instances characterized by real-world features. The experimental results show that the solution approach is effective and allows to obtain optimal/sub-optimal solutions in short computational times.