Transformations  in
Business & Economics

AN OPTIMAL DECISION PLAN FOR HOSPITALS OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT DURING PANDEMIC: A NONLINEAR PROGRAMMING MODEL
Chengliang Wang

ABSTRACT: Patient home waiting during a pandemic may trigger patients to baulk or renege. Meanwhile, hospitals need to ascertain whether patients have contracted infectious diseases. Given the patient baulking and reneging, hospitals should devise optimal operational management plans supported by rational admission decisions, buffer wards, and dynamic bed and nurse allocation. Using a non-linear programming model, this study explores the role of buffer wards to derive the optimal decision plan for the dynamic allocation of hospital beds and nurses, and the possible number of patients to be hospitalised in the presence of patient baulking and reneging. The optimal plan for patient admission and dynamic bed and nurse allocation is developed based on the Gurobi solver. Furthermore, a data-driven decision approach is proposed to update the model parameters over time based on the rolling horizon procedure. As a result, the aforementioned model proposes an optimal decision plan for the rational operational management of the hospital including the number of reneging and baulking patients, the movement of beds between different wards, and the number of rejected patients.

KEYWORDS:  optimal decision plan; hospital operational management; patient baulking; patient reneging; non-linear programming.

JEL classification:  D81, D02, I30, C4.