Recursive neural networks in hospital bed occupancy forecasting

BACKGROUND: Efficient planning of hospital bed usage is a necessary condition to minimize the hospital costs. In the presented work we deal with the problem of occupancy forecasting in the scale of several months, with a focus on personnel’s holiday planning. METHODS: We construct a model based on a set of recursive neural networks, which performs an occupancy prediction using historical admission and release data combined with external factors such as public and school holidays. The model requires no personal information on patients or staff. It is optimized for a 60 days forecast during the summer season (May–September). RESULTS: An average mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 6.24% was computed on 8 validation sets. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed machine learning model has shown to be competitive to standard time-series forecasting models and can be recommended for incorporation in medium-size hospitals automatized scheduling and decision making.