Track: Undergraduate Student Paper Competition

Abstract

Interhospital transfers of patients arise when there is a large volume of patients, and the reference hospital does not have an available bed to care for them. The network of hospitals in the Metropolitan Area of Asunción (AMA) from Paraguay include 14 referral hospitals with intensive care services for adults, whose utilization rate is generally high. This research aims to program the efficient assignment of patients to ICU beds (Intensive Care Unit) in health centers according to their priority of care and the level of congestion in a network of hospitals and considering as a case study a period of time during the Covid-19 pandemic. We developed a research framework based on the transport model to reduce the therapy service's saturation. For the computational programming of the model, we will use the Gurobi 8.1.1 optimization software with the Python programming language. Through these resources, it is expected to have an analysis of the current situation and one or several optimal solutions to support decision-making for efficiently allocating patients to ICU beds in the AMA from Paraguay.

Keywords
Mathematical programming, ICU beds, Saturation, Network of hospitals.