Artificial Intelligence in Demand and Capacity Modelling of Healthcare Systems.

Abstract

The increasing complexity of healthcare systems management requires the development of advanced methodologies to support efficient resource allocation, service delivery, and strategic planning. Artificial intelligence has emerged as an important tool in this domain, offering capabilities to model demand, predict capacity requirements, and inform operational decisions through data-driven insights. This article provides a comprehensive scoping review of AI-based approaches for demand and capacity modelling in healthcare systems. Specifically, it examines AI methods applied to key demand prediction tasks, including outpatient activity, emergency department attendances, hospital admissions and readmissions, and length of stay, as well as capacity planning for beds, workforce, equipment, and other critical resources. The review reports trends in AI models design, learning paradigms, performance reporting, and data usage, and highlights the relationship between demand modelling and downstream capacity predictions. In addition, the paper analyses data infrastructure requirements, commonly used datasets, and the growing role of explainable AI in supporting transparency and trust. Despite recent advances in the field, the integration of AI into healthcare systems faces significant challenges, including concerns related to privacy, ethics, data quality, interpretability, bias, scalability, policy variation, and data interoperability. Addressing these challenges is essential to develop sustainable, fair and resilient healthcare systems. Our review highlights the current state and gaps in the literature, and proposes future directions for advancing the use of AI in healthcare management systems are reviewed.