Managing Patient Admissions in a Neurology Ward

Saied Samiedaluie (), Beste Kucukyazici (), Vedat Verter () and Dan Zhang ()
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Saied Samiedaluie: Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2R6, Canada
Beste Kucukyazici: Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1G5, Canada
Vedat Verter: Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1G5, Canada
Dan Zhang: Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309

Operations Research, 2017, vol. 65, issue 3, 635-656

Abstract: We study patient admission policies in a neurology ward where there are multiple types of patients with different medical characteristics. Patients receive specialized care inside the neurology ward and delays in admission to the ward will have negative impact on their health status. The level of this impact varies among patient types and depends on the severity of patients. Patients are also different in terms of arrival rate and length of stay at the ward. The patients normally wait in the emergency department until a ward bed is assigned to them. We formulate this problem as an infinite-horizon average cost dynamic program and propose an efficient approximation scheme to solve large-scale problem instances. The computational results from applying our model to a neurology ward show that dynamic policies generated by our approach can reduce the overall deterioration in patients’ health status compared to several alternative policies.

Keywords: patient admission; neurology ward; approximate dynamic programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:65:y:2017:i:3:p:635-656

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