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This paper presents a methodology to plan treatments for rehabilitation outpatients. These patients require a series of treatments by therapists from various disciplines. In current practice, when treatments are planned, a lack of coordination between the different disciplines, along with a failure to plan the entire treatment plan at once, often occurs. This situation jeopardizes both the quality of care and the logistical performance. The multidisciplinary nature of the rehabilitation process complicates planning and control. An integral treatment planning methodology, based on an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation, ensures continuity of the rehabilitation process while simultaneously controlling seven performance indicators including access times, combination appointments, and therapist utilization. We apply our approach to the rehabilitation outpatient clinic of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Based on the results of this case, we are convinced that our approach can be valuable for decision-making support in resource capacity planning and control at many rehabilitation outpatient clinics. The developed model will be part of the new hospital information system of the AMC.

The design and operations of inpatient care facilities are typically largely historically shaped. A better match with the changing environment is often possible, and even inevitable due to the pressure on hospital budgets. Effectively organizing inpatient care requires simultaneous consideration of several interrelated planning issues. Also, coordination with upstream departments like the operating theater and the emergency department is much-needed. We present a generic analytical approach to predict bed census on nursing wards by hour, as a function of the Master Surgical Schedule (MSS) and arrival patterns of emergency patients. Along these predictions, insight is gained on the impact of strategic (i.e., case mix, care unit size, care unit partitioning), tactical (i.e., allocation of operating room time, misplacement rules), and operational decisions (i.e., time of admission/discharge). The method is used in the Academic Medical Center Amsterdam as a decision support tool in a complete redesign of the inpatient care operations.