A hospital admission planning model for operating room allocation under uncertain demand requirements

Operating room (OR) is known as one of scarce resources in the hospital system. The aim of this study is to obtain an admission schedule for the patient mix which improves overall operating room performance by minimising the shortfalls of the resource consumption to their target utilisations. The MILP formulation to generate this plan is developed by incorporating the uncertain demand requirements such as length of stay, emergency arrival, and the introduction of no‐show condition into the model. By benchmarking with some known models, the analysis reveals that the proposed model yields a decreasing in gap of the usages of OR resources by considering the no‐show. An admission plan created by the model indicates a better performance that results in fewer deviations between actual and target utilisations while satisfying the given restrictions. In application, the hospital admission planner may need a minor modification on the resource allocation levels to achieve the proper balance between the demands and capacities.