Deciding kidney-offer admissibility dependent on patients’ lifetime failure rate

Michael Bendersky and Israel David

European Journal of Operational Research, 2016, vol. 251, issue 2, 686-693

Abstract: We use developments in full-information optimal stopping to decide kidney-offer admissibility depending on the patient’s age in treatment, on his/her estimated lifetime probabilistic profile and his/her prospects on the waiting list. We allow for a broad family of lifetime distributions – the Gamma – thus enabling flexible modeling of patients survival under dialysis. We fully automate an appropriate recursive solution in a spreadsheet application. It yields the optimal critical times for acceptance of offers of different qualities, and the ensuing expected value-to-go as a function of time. The model may serve both the organizer of a donation program for planning purposes, and the particular surgeon in making the critical decision at the proper time. It may further serve the potential individual recipient, practicing present-day patient-choice. Numerical results and their discussion are included.

Keywords: Organ allocation; Centralized decision making; Patient-choice; Erlang lifetime; Optimal stopping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:251:y:2016:i:2:p:686-693

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.12.009

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