Guided Notes
Operations & Capacity Analytics
Patient flow, bed occupancy and census by hour, ED and OR throughput, staffing to demand, forecasting volumes, and queueing intuition.
Patient flow
Slide 1 / 5Hospitals are connected systems: ED → inpatient beds → discharge → post-acute care. • A bottleneck anywhere backs up everything upstream (e.g. slow discharges → no beds → ED boarding → long ED waits → LWBS). • Analysts measure each step's timing and find the constraint. • Common metrics: census by hour, occupancy, ED boarding hours, discharge time of day, OR utilization, transfer center delays.