Queuing Networks in Health Care Systems

Maartje E. Zonderland () and Richard J. Boucherie ()
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Maartje E. Zonderland: University of Twente
Richard J. Boucherie: University of Twente

Chapter Chapter 9 in Handbook of Healthcare System Scheduling, 2012, pp 201-243 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Over the last decades, the concept of patient flow has received an increased amount of attention. Health care professionals have become aware that in order to analyze the performance of a single health care facility, its relationship with other health care facilities should also be taken into account. A natural choice for analysis of networks of health care facilities is queuing theory. With a queuing network a fast and flexible analysis is provided that discovers bottlenecks and allows for the evaluation of alternative set-ups of the network. In this chapter we describe how queuing theory, and networks of queues in particular, can be invoked to model, study, analyze, and solve health care problems. We describe important theoretical queuing results, give a review of the literature on the topic, discuss in detail two examples of how a health care problem is analyzed using a queuing network, and suggest directions for future research.

Keywords: Service Time; Arrival Rate; Sojourn Time; Service Discipline; Queue Length Distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4614-1734-7_9

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