Glossary · approach
Patient Flow
The operations-research and queueing study of how patients move through hospital units — ER, ward, intensive care, discharge — and the timing decisions that shape throughput and length of stay.
Hospital Patient FlowPatient ThroughputCare Pathway Flow
Patient Flow is the operations-research study of the network of bed pools and the patient transitions through them — emergency department to inpatient ward, ward to intensive care and back, ward to discharge — and the timing decisions (admission, transfer, discharge) that drive throughput, length of stay, ER boarding and bed-utilisation balance. Hulshof, Kortbeek, Boucherie, Hans and Bakker (2012) structurally classify healthcare planning into offline (capacity planning, weekly / monthly) and online (intraday assignment) decision layers; Patient Flow models span both layers. Common methods: queueing networks (Green 2006), Markov chains for bed-pool balance (Cochran and Bharti 2006), discrete-event simulation for what-if capacity studies (Vanberkel et al. 2010), rolling-horizon MIP for daily assignment. Typical objectives: minimum ED boarding, minimum length-of-stay drift, balanced ward utilisation, minimum elective cancellations. Patient Flow is usually paired with Bed Allocation.
Örnek
A 250-bed hospital uses a queueing-network Patient Flow model to plan a ward expansion: simulating winter flu-season demand, the model shows that adding 12 beds in internal medicine cuts ED boarding by 35% while a comparable surgical-ward expansion only cuts it by 8%.