Principles on the benefits of manufacturing process flexibility
Management Science
Partitioning Customers Into Service Groups
Management Science
Pattern Recognition Letters - Special issue on machine learning and data mining in pattern recognition
Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management
Mastering Data Mining: The Art and Science of Customer Relationship Management
Data Mining to Support Simulation Modeling of Patient Flow in Hospitals
Journal of Medical Systems
Introduction to Data Mining, (First Edition)
Introduction to Data Mining, (First Edition)
Using classification trees to assess low birth weight outcomes
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
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Hospital beds are a scarce resource and always in need. The beds are often organized by clinical specialties for better patient care. When the Accident & Emergency Department (A&E) admits a patient, there may not be an available bed that matches the requested specialty. The patient may be thus asked to wait at the A&E till a matching bed is available, or assigned a bed from a different specialty, which results in bed overflow. While this allows the patient to have faster access to an inpatient bed and treatment, it creates other problems. For instance, nursing care may be suboptimal and the doctors will need to spend more time to locate the overflow patients. The decision to allocate an overflow bed, or to let the patient wait a bit longer, can be a complicated one. While there can be a policy to guide the bed allocation decision, in reality it depends on clinical calls, current supply and waiting list, projected supply (i.e. planned discharges) and demand. The extent of bed overflow can therefore vary greatly, both in time dimension and across specialties. In this study, we extracted hospital data and used statistical and data mining approaches to identify the patterns behind bed overflow. With this insight, the hospital administration can be better equipped to devise strategies to reduce bed overflow and therefore improve patient care. Computational results show the viability of these intelligent data analysis techniques for understanding and managing the bed overflow problem