Applications of Queueing Models in Hospitals

In a hospital system, increasing resource utilization to reduce costs and decreasing patients’ waiting time to provide timely care and improve patient satisfaction are important but conflicting goals. Queueing models can provide reasonably accurate evaluations of system performance and are popular among researchers and system designers because of their analytical nature and their ability to provide quick solutions for “what-if” analyses. There is a considerable amount of published research on using queueing to analyze and design hospital facilities. We review and categorize this literature in an attempt to motivate further research in applying queueing models in the healthcare domain