Zuyderland, a hospital in Limburg (NL), is committed to innovation in healthcare. With a focus on enhancing patient care, the hospital actively pursues the development and implementation of new ideas, resources, techniques, services and processes.

Moving patients within the hospital is more complex than it seems. Departments often use temporarily available beds on sister wards until their own beds become available. Timely coordination is essential to minimize logistical challenges, emphasizing the need for early requests. With high patient inflows, the hospital must have enough staff to ensure that patients can be properly accommodated and receive clinical care. Last but not least, by gaining insight into the right information, hospital staff could take more efficient preventive action, for instance by carrying out more discharge rounds when there is a peak of patients coming in.

To address these challenges and assist Zuyderland in enhancing their capacity planning efforts, Data Science experts from Mediaan Conclusion collaborate with experts from Zuyderland, focusing on three key areas:

To overcome all the challenges and get the best possible solution, the team created a hybrid model. We had to ensure that the model could not only predict the number of patients admitted to the hospital, but also indicate upper and lower thresholds with a degree of confidence. This would allow you to strategically plan for worse-case scenarios, so that even if you end up admitting more patients than statistically expected, you still have enough capacity. The information obtained from this prediction would then be used as input to simulate the movement of patients from one ward to another. We then developed a user-friendly dashboard that provides a clear and better overview.