Integrated Planning in Hospitals: A Review

TL;DR

This paper reviews the literature on integrated hospital resource planning using Operations Research, highlighting methods, insights, and gaps, and proposing a taxonomy for classification and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive review and taxonomy of integrated hospital planning approaches in Operations Research literature, identifying gaps and future research avenues.

Findings

Cross comparisons reveal links between modeling methods and practical implementation.

Analysis shows the importance of uncertainty modeling and real-life data in planning approaches.

The review highlights gaps and promising directions for future research.

Abstract

Efficient planning of scarce resources in hospitals is a challenging task for which a large variety of Operations Research and Management Science approaches have been developed since the 1950s. While efficient planning of single resources such as operating rooms, beds, or specific types of staff can already lead to enormous efficiency gains, integrated planning of several resources has been shown to hold even greater potential, and a large number of integrated planning approaches have been presented in the literature over the past decades. This paper provides the first literature review that focuses specifically on the Operations Research and Management Science literature related to integrated planning of different resources in hospitals. We collect the relevant literature and analyze it regarding different aspects such as uncertainty modeling and the use of real-life data. Several cross comparisons reveal interesting insights concerning, e.g., relations between the modeling and solution methods used and the practical implementation of the approaches developed. Moreover, we provide a high-level taxonomy for classifying different resource-focused integration approaches and point out gaps in the literature as well as promising directions for future research.