A mixed integer programming approach to the patient admission scheduling problem

Abstract Among the many challenges involved in efficient healthcare resource planning, the Patient Admission Scheduling Problem is of particular significance, impacting organizational decisions at all planning levels. The problem of scheduling patient admissions involves assigning patients to beds over a given time horizon so as to maximize treatment efficiency, patient comfort and hospital utilization, while satisfying all necessary medical constraints and taking into consideration patient preferences as much as possible. A number of different variants of the Patient Admission Scheduling Problem exist at the strategic, tactical, and operational levels. In this paper, we consider a static offline operational level variant for which we propose a comprehensive mixed integer programming formulation and advance an exact solution method. We generate new best found solutions for 9 out of 13 benchmark instances from a publicly available repository. Additionally, we prove the optimality of two best known solutions reported in the literature.