Target times for inpatient discharge scheduling

The discharge scheduling process presented in this paper proposes a new paradigm for discharging inpatients from a hospital and was developed through collaboration with the Medical Center Hospital in Odessa, Texas. An optimization model that incorporates systematic capacities and patient preferences into generating target discharge times for patients is presented together with a system design to achieve the practical implementation of such. The mathematical model is an extension of an assignment model whose inputs and outputs may be incorporated into patient tracking software through a series of queries. The model considers physician loads and rounding patterns, available transporters, nursing staff workloads, and patient characteristics and preferences in assigning a time for which a patient is scheduled for discharge. In addition, the model has built in the ability to relax constraints so as to prevent solution infeasibility in practice.