Abstract

Health sector is one of the developing areas in service sector. The importance of health sector has been increasing in business world. As prediction of demand is harder than other sectors, forecasting is more complex in health sector. Forecasting of patient demand affects many areas such as staff scheduling inventory cost and other costs. There is a substantial literature regarding forecasting; whereas research regarding patient forecasting is much more limited. This research aims to forecast patient demand in a private hospital. Not only outpatient demand is forecasted but also number of surgeries and number of inpatient treatment day demand is forecasted. Number of surgeries is forecasted using outpatient demand and number of inpatient demand is forecasted using number of surgeries. In this research moving average, exponential smoothing, Holt Method, trend analysis and regression analysis are applied for forecasting for each department. The results obtained are compared according to error measures.