How inpatient boarding impacts ED performance: a queueing analysis

Raïsa Carmen and Inneke Van Nieuwenhuyse

No 545120, Working Papers of Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Leuven

Abstract: This article uses a Markov-modulated fluid queue approach to gain insights into the effect of boarding patients on emergency department performance. Important features of the network are (1) a semi-open structure to model limited bed capacity in addition to a limited physician capacity, (2) inpatient boarding, and (3) discontinuous treatment where patients may visit the physician more than once. Our analysis is numerical and exact: moreover, it is faster than the standard Quasi-birth-death method and simplifies the calculation of service levels in the external queue. We observe that boarding-reducing policies that focus on decreasing the boarding time perform better than policies that focus on decreasing the probability of boarding.

Keywords: Markov-modulated fluid queue; Emergency department; Boarding; Bed block (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in FEB Research Report KBI_1619

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/394240 How inpatient boarding impacts ED performance: a queueing analysis (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ete:kbiper:545120

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().