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Bringing Robustness to Patient Flow Management Through Optimized Patient Transports in Hospitals

School of Business, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, 4600 Olten, Switzerland
Department of Business Administration, University of Applied Sciences, D-66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics, 67663 Kaiserslauten, Germany, and Saarland University, D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany
thomas.hanne{at}fhnw.ch
teresa.melo{at}htw-saarland.de
s.nickel{at}orl.uni-saarland.de

Intrahospital transports are often required for diagnostic or therapeutic reasons. Depending on the hospital layout, transportation between nursing wards and service units is either provided by ambulances or by trained personnel who accompany patients on foot. In many large German hospitals, the patient transport service is poorly managed and lacks work-flow coordination. This contributes to higher hospital costs (e.g., because a patient is not delivered to the operating room on time) and to patient inconvenience (e.g., because of long waiting times). We designed a computer-based planning system, Opti-TRANS^©, that supports all phases of the transportation flow, including travel booking, dispatching transport requests, and monitoring and reporting trips in real time. The methodology, which we developed to solve the underlying optimization problem—a dynamic dial-a-ride problem with hospital-specific constraints, draws on fast heuristic methods to ensure the efficient and timely provision of transports. We illustrate the strong impact of Opti-TRANS on the daily performance of the patient transportation service of a large German hospital. The major benefits of Opti-TRANS include streamlined transportation processes and work flow, significant savings, and improved patient satisfaction. Moreover, it has contributed to increased awareness among hospital staff of the importance of implementing efficient logistics practices.

Key Words: health care; transportation; vehicle routing; scheduling vehicles; programming; integer; algorithms; heuristic