HDSC325-Intrahospital-Transportation

Intra-hospital transportation refers to physically transporting patients who are involved in inpatient care from their hospital beds to other locations for purposes of testing or surgery and then escorting them back to their patient ward. In Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the task of transportation is mainly carried out by transporters in the patient transport team, and the requests for intra-hospital transportation are coordinated by a centralized system that manages the queues of patient transport requests and assigns transporters to fulfill the requests. While intra-hospital patient transport is crucial to providing efficient and timely patient care, transport staff could be in short supply. Delays in transporting patients due to limited transporters have caused problems in delayed procedures and underutilization of operating room resources when physicians and nurses are onsite for the appointments but need to wait for the arrival of patients. The untimely transportation can subsequently disrupt the following schedules and waste highly valuable resources, leading to unnecessary hospital costs. Therefore, the motivation of this project is to efficiently optimize the resources in the patient transport team by predicting the wait time, completion time, and total time for intra-hospital transportation requests.