TITLE: Inpatient Flow Management in a Singaporean Hospital

SPEAKER: Pengyi Shi

ABSTRACT:

We study patient flow management in an inpatient department of a Singaporean hospital. We focus on understanding the effect of an "early discharge" policy, implemented in late 2009, on ward overflow rate and on fraction of ED patients who have to wait six hours or longer to get a bed. We propose a new stochastic network model whose service times are not independent, identically distributed (iid) and are dictated by a discharge distribution. We discuss a number of other key features that need to be built into the model. We show, via a simulation study, that our model is able to capture the hourly performance of the inpatient operation. The model allows one to evaluate the impact of operational policies such as early discharge and overflow policies.

This is joint work with Jim Dai (Georgia Tech), Ding Ding (University of International Business & Economics, Beijng), and James Ang and Mabel Chou (NUS).