MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF OCCUPANCY DATA: A HEALTHCARE CAPACITY PLANNING APPLICATION

Managerial decision making problems in the healthcare industry often involve considerations of customer occupancy by time of day and day of week. Through a case study at a large tertiary care hospital, we discuss a number of issues that arise in analyzing occupancy data which have implications for design of healthcare operations oriented data warehouses and analysis tools. We offer practical solutions to these problems including a transaction oriented database design, a general database framework and software tool for analysis of occupancy related data and a method for simulating entity flow from the data mart.