Development of methodology for forecasting hospital occupancy by econometric method

The demand for health services in Brazil has increased significantly in recent years. From 2007 to 2011 there has been an increase of 87.2% in number of patients-day in Brazilian hospitals. The purpose of this article is to develop a methodology for forecasting of occupancy in hospitals, through daily information of occupation and admission that are provided by the emergency service. It is believed that, by means of these information and its projections, will be possible to improve both the flow of patients in a hospital, as the customer services. To this end, we used econometric analysis and projection methods of time series for evaluating the forecast of these variables for two Brazilian hospitals.