Hospital Admission Systems: Their Evaluation and Management

The paper presents a holistic analysis of hospital management admission systems. It outlines control strategies which will facilitate a system's effectiveness for various organizational attributes. In particular, attention is focused on bed occupancy levels and on the stability of flows into the hospital as interacting control variables.

The paper surveys the major available mathematical models and evaluates their use vs. the use of simulation. It emphasizes the potential use of an iterative assignment model which explicitly considers the alternative profiles for preferences for service attributes held by the various participants in the admission system. To reconcile conflicting objectives of these participants the DELPHI and the Multi-attribute Reduction methods are proposed.