Efficient planning of scarce resources in hospitals is a challenging task for
which a large variety of Operations Research and Management Science approaches
have been developed since the 1950s. While efficient planning of single
resources such as operating rooms, beds, or specific types of staff can already
lead to enormous efficiency gains, integrated planning of several resources has
been shown to hold even greater potential, and a large number of integrated
planning approaches have been presented in the literature over the past
decades.
This paper provides the first literature review that focuses specifically on
the Operations Research and Management Science literature related to integrated
planning of different resources in hospitals. We collect the relevant
literature and analyze it regarding different aspects such as uncertainty
modeling and the use of real-life data. Several cross comparisons reveal
interesting insights concerning, e.g., relations between the modeling and
solution methods used and the practical implementation of the approaches
developed. Moreover, we provide a high-level taxonomy for classifying different
resource-focused integration approaches and point out gaps in the literature as
well as promising directions for future research