Impact of the Automation of Inpatient Bed Management to Reduce the Emergency Service Waiting Time.

The patient waiting time to be transferred for hospitalization is the time that the patient waits between the decision to hospitalize and the actual admission to an inpatient hospital bed. One of the difficulties encountered in qualifying waiting time for inpatient bed is the inability of hospital information systems to measure it. Hospitals in France have a specialized bed allocation team. This team must manage the bed allocation problem between different hospital departments using phone communication to assign patients to the adapted service. This kind of communication represents a lengthy additional workload in which effectiveness is uncertain. This paper presents a new approach to automate bed management in downstream service. For that, we have implemented algorithms based on artificial intelligent integrated in an inpatient web platform using IoT-Beacons, which is implemented to improve and facilitate the exchange of availability information of downstream beds within the Lille university hospital center (LUHC).

An Innovative Approach to Jointly Scheduling and Assigning a Consultation Time to Patients Arriving in the Emergency Department.

Emergency departments (ED) are facing problems related to the growing demand of care. Patients' management is carried out according to the type of patient and care required: already scheduled patients and non-scheduled urgent and non-urgent patients arriving in the ED. One of the main problems confronted in hospitals is the permanent interference between these different types of patients to be treated under the stochastic behaviors of consultation time and arrival flows, which prevents any prior planning. The present work proposes a dynamic scheduling method, considering the impact of new patients' arrivals on the treatment of patients already scheduled to minimize the mean waiting time of patients in the ED. The originality of this work is to assign, at the time of arrival, a scheduled time to each patient in order to reduce their stress. The performance of the proposed method is examined through a concrete application in the Pediatric Emergency Department of CHRU of Lille.