Intelligent Systems for Healthcare Management and Delivery

Emergency departments (EDs) are one of the most valuable departments of healthcare management systems. Patient arrivals at the EDs are crucial for planning of the future. Accurate forecasting of patient arrivals contributes to better organized human resources and medical devices in the EDs. Therefore, in this chapter, the authors aim to develop a hybrid model including the methods of autoregressive integrated moving average with external variables (ARIMAX) and artificial neural network (ANN) in a hospital ED. The arrival data was collected from the hospital information system of a public hospital in eastern Turkey. The model incorporates factors related to ED arrivals such as climatic and calendar variables. By the aid of the proposed model, an insight to arrangement and planning of ED resources can be provided in a better way