Effective Forecasting of Key Features in Hospital Emergency Department

Efficiently forecasting the demands within a hospital’s Emergency Department (ED) is critical for optimal resource allocation and patient care management. This study focuses on leveraging deep learning techniques to predict various types of ED patient flows, facilitating informed decision-making by ED managers. The rising success of deep learning networks in modeling timeseries data makes them a compelling choice for patient flow forecasting. In this context, we investigate and compare seven deep learning models-Deep Belief Network (DBN), Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), combined GRU and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN-GRU), LSTM-CNN, and Generative Adversarial Network based on Recurrent Neural Networks (GAN-RNN)—to accurately forecast patient flow within a hospital’s emergency department. To enable traffic flow forecasting, a forecaster layer is introduced for each model. Real-world patient flow data spanning different ED services (biology, radiology, scanner, and echography) at Lille regional hospital in France serve as a case study to evaluate these models. Four effectiveness metrics are employed to assess and compare the forecasting methods. The outcomes demonstrate the superior performance of deep learning models in predicting ED patient flows compared to conventional shallow approaches like ridge regression and support vector regression. Significantly, the Deep Belief Network (DBN) stands out, achieving an averaged mean absolute percentage error of approximately 4.097.