Intelligent analysis of acute bed overflow in a tertiary hospital in Singapore.

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.

Length of stay-based patient flow models: recent developments and future directions.

Modelling patient flow in health care systems is vital in understanding the system activity and may therefore prove to be useful in improving their functionality. An extensively used measure is the average length of stay which, although easy to calculate and quantify, is not considered appropriate when the distribution is very long-tailed. In fact, simple deterministic models are generally considered inadequate because of the necessity for models to reflect the complex, variable, dynamic and multidimensional nature of the systems.