Assigning patients to rooms in a private hospital in Kuwait

The current practice of assigning an inpatient, in many private hospitals in Kuwait, to a room is based on full bed pooling. Full bed pooling results in wasting doctors valuable time by traveling long distances among patients, creating difficulties in moving equipment between patients, and making nurses' job harder since they are dealing with patients in different medical conditions. In this paper, we propose the following methodology to cluster rooms of similar medical conditions together. First, the number of rooms to be clustered together is determined using queuing theory. Then, departments are grouped together based on historical data. Next, integer programming is used to optimise the revenue and refine the results obtained from grouping. By applying the proposed policy, the hospital improves the doctors' efficiency, facilitates the movement of special equipment between patients and allows nurses to specialise in a certain medical specialty, which ultimately improves the service level.