Modeling Patient Flow among Hospital Wards Using Non-Diagnostic Data

Abstract

Hospital bed capacity is a limited resource and a key concern in health care planning. Using discrete-event simulation modeling and the MIMIC-III data set, this paper produces a demographic and metadata-only model of patient transfer within hospital wards. The model successfully approximated the underlying transfer dynamics (95.63% accuracy measured using RMSE). The accompanying visualization may be used to examine patient flow. The simulation will be used as a test bed for future work concerning flow of artificially generated patient admissions and can in general be useful in simulating patient flow in cases where demographic information is available but transfer records are not.