Optimization of inpatient care unit resources during COVID-19 pandemic

Hospitals and the health care system faced an unprecedented challenge during the Covid-19 pandemic. Health care managers needed to develop optimal resource utilization plans to serve the maximum number of patients. The pandemic conditions resulted in increasing demand that has put additional pressures on the health care systems' budgets and capacity. This has lead to more challenging resource allocation and wait time management problems. In this paper, we will investigate optimal resource utilization under a given budget where patients are allowed to be transferred among hospitals in a health care system. We will also investigate a policy where a hospital may be designated as a dedicated COVID-19 facility. We carried numerical experiments investigated the effect of patient arrivals, waiting time and unmet demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that patient transfer will reduce the waiting time, unmet demand and also would help the policymaker/ health care leader to set the budget for hospitals to meet the surge in demand for intensive care unit caused by COVID-19.