Integrated Planning in Hospitals: Complexity, Analytics, Reorganization, Efficiency

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Clemens Thielen, since 2/2023
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2020 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 443158418

• Final Report Year: 2025

Final Report Abstract

A well-performing health care system is one of the most important factors for the prosperity and well-being of a society. In this context, hospitals are key providers of health care services. High-quality health care requires the necessary resources — such as personnel and beds — to be appropriately dimensioned and available at the right place and time. Typically, resource-related planning problems are treated separately for each resource, without integrated planning across multiple resource types. This results in suboptimal decisions and missed opportunities for improving the quality of care. This scientific network connected researchers from Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom to advance research on integrated planning in hospitals and generate awareness for this important research topic in the scientific community and among hospital practitioners. During biannual network meetings, topic-specific workshops, and numerous online sessions, we reviewed the state-of-the-art regarding integrated planning problems in hospitals by conducting a detailed survey of the existing scientific literature and by evaluating existing approaches and needs for integrated planning from a practical perspective. These analyses serves as the basis for identifying promising future research directions and for developing advanced operations research and optimization methods for the integrated planning of critical hospital resources such as beds and staff. These methods were developed and tested using real-world data from collaborating hospitals. Throughout the project duration, we generated significant awareness for the necessity of integrated planning within both the research community and health care practice. More than twenty talks and eleven organized sessions on integrated planning at scientific conferences — including discussion talks and a podium discussion with health care experts — significantly contributed to making integrated planning a recognized research topic within the operations research community and beyond. In addition, collaborations with hospitals and talks for health care practitioners have generated awareness for the practical potential of integrated planning. Through these activities, our international scientific network has become firmly established as a platform for ongoing scientific collaboration among the involved researchers. A permanent organizational structure for the network has been implemented to ensure its continuation. Two proposals for future funding have already been approved.

Publications

• Machine learning-based patient selection in an emergency department
  N. Furian, M. O’Sullivan, C. Walker & M. Reuter-Oppermann
  
• Hybrid Models with Real-Time Data in Healthcare: A Focus on Data Synchronization and Experimentation. 2023 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), 1148-1159. IEEE.
  Mustafee, Navonil; Harper, Alison & Viana, Joe
  
• Hybrid Models with Real-time Data: Characterising Real-time Simulation and Digital Twins. Proceedings of SW21 The OR Society Simulation Workshop, 261-271. Operational Research Society.
  Mustafee, Navonil; Harper, Alison & Viana, Joe
  
• A Maturity Model for Digital Twins in Healthcare. 2024 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), 1151-1162. IEEE.
  Mustafee, Navonil; Harper, Alison; Viana, Joe & Monks, Thomas
  
• Infant care transfers: simulating neonatal infant pathways and transfers across a neonatal network. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 76(9), 1731-1748.
  Penn, Marion & Viana, Joe
  
• Integrated planning in hospitals: a review. OR Spectrum.
  Rachuba, Sebastian; Reuter-Oppermann, Melanie & Thielen, Clemens
  
• Evaluating the impact of COVID-19 protection measures and staff absence on radiotherapy practice: A simulation study. PLOS ONE, 20(1), e0314190.
  Jambor, Elisabeth; Viana, Joe; Reuter-Oppermann, Melanie & Müller-Polyzou, Ralf
  
• Integrated patient-to-room and nurse-to-patient assignment in hospital wards. OR Spectrum.
  Brandt, Tabea; Klein, Tom Lorenz; Reuter-Oppermann, Melanie; Schäfer, Fabian; Thielen, Clemens; de Vrugt, Maartje van & Viana, Joe
  
• Patient transport in hospitals: A literature review of Operations Research and Management Science methods. Operations Research, Data Analytics and Logistics, 45, 200472.
  Klein, Tom Lorenz & Thielen, Clemens
  
• Towards a Hospital-wide Simulation Framework. Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
  Reuter-Oppermann, Melanie