Inpatient ward beds play a central role in hospital operations. To better facilitate coordination of care, the beds are usually grouped into different specialized units, with each unit designated to serve patients in certain primary specialties. However, inpatient wards are often associated with...

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals were in dire need of data-driven analytics to provide support for critical, expensive, and challenging decisions. Yet, the majority of analytics being developed were targeted toward state- and national-level policy decisions, with little...