An Advanced Heuristic Approach for the Optimization of Patient Flow in Hospital Emergency Department

Hospital institutions are one of the most serious organizations over the world, due to their core duty in saving lives, by providing healthcare in an efficient and swift way. Emergency Department (ED) is the main entrance to the hospital, which takes on charge the primary treatment of patients under a time restriction. Many recent studies focused on minimizing the patient Length Of Stay (LOS) by extending resources or altering ̳ED‘ organization (medical teams, scheduling, etc.), without defecting the fundamentals processes. The objective of this study is to improve patient care quality. The improvement is based on resource extending, in order to determine the suitable amount of resource to be added, a Fuzzy Logic system was designed to calculate the target improvement appropriated with the amount of resource and the number of incoming patients. Then, a colored Petri net simulation model was built to measure the reached improvement by comparing it to the current system state. The case study was realized at the ̳ED‘ of Benaouda Benzerdjeb Hospital, located in Oran city, Algeria. As the results of this study, the total patient length of stay inside the ̳ED‘ was minimized, as well as the rate of treated patients.