Bed Management – Hybrid simulation of a bed logistics flow at a Danish public hospital

The population is aging; the patients’ expectation for the quality of
care is increasing, and, as a consequence, hospitals face a growing
patient workload. Beds are an essential resource, which follows the
patients, and must be adequately managed. Stock-outs could lead to
severe consequences: delays, redirectionsor procedure cancellations.
Therefore, reliable and robust bed management is fundamental for
well-performing hospitals. Beds have their own internal flow. The
whole bed cycle has two parts: in use with the patient and after usage, without, including cleaning, transport, and storage. Beds navigate
with the patients through all the departments of the hospital and their
specific and independent processes. The patients constitute a highly
uncertain demand, as their number and characteristics (length of stay
or pathology) make forecasting, planning, and execution more difficult. Bed management involves several disciplines and methods from
Management Science. We conducted a literature review that highlights
the cross-departmental aspects of bed management and the potential
for holistic approaches. With the digital technologies, the quantity of
hospital data has skyrocketed, giving the opportunity to devise new
data-driven decision-support tools. In that optic, we work jointly with
Rigshospitalet, a public hospital in Denmark, using their data in a bed
management case study to build a simulation model that can help better understand, optimize, beds and patients flows. This model takes
into account the entire bed flow of the hospital, which allows operating on the entire bed cycle and bed fleet and evaluate new policies
and processes. The objectives are to smooth the demand, minimize the
workload, and reduce the need for storage and resources.