Operations Management in Intensive Care Unit Scheduling: A Literature Review

Abstract

The intensive care unit (ICU) is a crucial and expensive resource largely affected by uncertainty and variability. Insufficient ICU capacity causes many negative effects not only for the ICU itself, but also makes it a bottleneck in hospital patient flows. Operations research/management science (OR/MS) plays an important role in identifying ways to manage ICU capacities efficiently and ensuring service quality simultaneously. As a consequence, numerous papers on the topic exist. The aim of this paper is to provide the first structured literature review on how OR/MS may support ICU scheduling and planning. We start our review by illustrating the important role the ICU plays in the hospital patient flow. Then we focus on the ICU scheduling problem (single department scheduling problem) and classify the literature from multiple angles, including decision horizons, problem settings, and modeling and solution techniques. Based on the classification logic, gaps in the current research and significant trends for future research are highlighted, for instance, combining bed capacity planning and personnel scheduling, applying non-homogenous distributions to model uncertainties, and exploring more efficient solution approaches.