Hospital Decision Research Considering Patient Transition Within Multiple Units

Problems have existed in large general hospitals in China,such as patient admission blockage and long waiting.The complicated patient flow transitions make the hospital management more complicated.This article analyzes the different modes of patient transition for this problem first.And then we do the decision analysis for two modes.The first one is the patient referral cooperation between different hospitals,and the other is the patient flow transfer in the maser-branch system formed by newly-built branch hospital.Referral cooperation is one typical way to help solve congestion.This paper studies the phenomenon of multi-class patients with multi-stage treatment.The referral cooperation mechanism with a community hospital is presented by a queueing network,an innovative iterative algorithm is designed to solve the system effectively based on the blocking time,and the error is mostly within 1% compared to simulation.The benefit function of the tertiary hospital is constructed by the relevant results obtained from the algorithm.In the case study part,the optimal referral decision scheme of heterogeneous patients can be made in different scenarios.Branch hospital’s construction is another way to help release resources.As a key factor,the medical quality level will lead to patients’ re-entry problems and resource waste.In this paper,both construction and operation stages are considered in the benefit function.An optimization model is established based on the capacity,medical quality level,and transition rate of the master hospital.The iterative algorithm is developed,and a hybrid nested optimization algorithm is designed to obtain the optimal solution.Then the case study of Ruijin Hospital is carried out,and relevant suggestions are made through numerical studies.