Forecasting hospital census at a tertiary care children's hospital.
Nephi Walton, Mollie R. Poynton, Chris Maloney, Per Hans Gesteland · PubMed · 2007
Developing a forecasting tool for patient census allows for improved staffing, better resource utilization and mobilization, and improved timing of educational campaigns around the disease control process. Using a neural network approach we evaluated several different models and variables for predicting patient census prospectively. These initial studies enabled selection of a subset of predictor variables and show that different network models, and variables must be used based on the season.