Patient Flow Scheduling and Capacity Planning in a Smart Hospital Environment

Abstract

Improving patient flow is a way to refine health services. An efficient patient flow can improve the quality of services and the utilization of resources. A smart environment could facilitate the experience of individuals within a physical space, such as a hospital. Meanwhile, a smart healthcare environment could improve patient flow through an efficient scheduling policy and the utilization of healthcare resources by an optimized capacity plan. This paper, first, explores a dynamic scheduling policy to improve the patient flow, and an efficient capacity scheme based on the varying patient flow. This scheduling policy and the capacity scheme can be built in a smart hospital environment through wireless sensor networks and smart healthcare systems. The research applies a formal modeling approach that can provide a quantitative analysis of systems. This approach, performance evaluation process algebra, can give strict definitions for the patient flow in order to model the dynamic scheduling policy and the capacity scheme; moreover, it provides a scalable performance analysis by the fluid flow approximation. Finally, this paper is concerned with how formal method might be used to model and analyze the scheduling policy and the capacity plan on improving the healthcare service before deployment.