Systems and techniques for monitoring, predicting and/or alerting for census periods in medical inpatient units are presented. A system can perform a first machine learning process to learn patterns in patient flow data related to a set of patient identities and a set of operations associated with a set of medical inpatient units. The system can also perform a second machine learning process to detect abnormalities associated with the patterns in the patient flow data. Furthermore, the system can determine patient census data associated with a prediction for a total number of patient identities in the set of medical inpatient units during a period of time based on the patterns and the abnormalities. The system can also generate an alert for a user interface in response to a determination that the patient census data satisfies a defined criterion.