Literature review on integrated hospital scheduling problems

This paper presents a review of the literature on integrated hospital scheduling problems. In these problems, patients need to sequentially visit multiple resource types in a hospital setting in order to receive full treatment. Therefore, each patient is assigned a specific path over a subset of the resources and each step of the path needs to be scheduled. The main aim of these problems is to have each patient complete all stages of his or her path within the required due date, such that all patients receive timely care. This is important as a delayed diagnosis or treatment may result in adverse health effects. Also, with integrated scheduling, hospitals have the opportunity to augment patient satisfaction by creating a smooth patient flow, even if the patient needs to visit multiple hospital departments. In order to structure the growing body of literature in this field, a classification scheme is proposed and used to classify all scientific work on integrated hospital scheduling published between 1995 and 2016. The results are surprising as, although pathway concepts such as clinical pathways or diagnosis related groups have been around for several decades, the classification scheme indicates that the majority of relevant work is only quite recent. In fact, integrated hospital scheduling is currently gaining progressively more momentum in practice as well as in the academic literature. Both seem to have realized that eliminating the silos of information in hospitals is no longer optional but a true necessity if overall performance needs to be maximized.