The Patient Admission Scheduling of an Ophthalmic Hospital Using Genetic Algorithm

Currently, FCFS scheduling method is widely used in hospitals for patient admission scheduling, which ignores the impacts of patient length of stay and surgery arrangement on the usage of hospital resources. This paper proposes a more comprehensive mathematical model and evaluation mechanism for the patient admission scheduling of an ophthalmic hospital. A genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed to optimize the model, which can provide detailed scheduling of patient admission in the hospital for everyday. The result is compared with that of the traditional FCFS method, which indicates that the GA helps to reduce the preoperative waiting time for patients. Besides, GA can provide different kinds of scheduling for the hospital to select by adjusting the relative weights of different objectives in the algorithm. KeywordsOphthalmic hospital, patient admission scheduling, genetic algorithm