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Managing a patient waiting list with time-dependent priority and adverse events

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2013

Daiki Min  and
Yuehwern Yih
Daiki Min
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, College of Business Administration, Ewha Womans University, 52 Ewhayeodae-gil, Seoul, 120-750, Korea. dmin@ewha.ac.kr
Yuehwern Yih
Affiliation:
Professor, School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, 315 N. Grant Street, West Lafayette, IN, 47906, USA; yih@purdue.edu
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Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of managing a waiting list for elective surgery to decide the number of patients selected from the waiting list and to schedule them in accordance with the operating room capacity in the next period. The waiting list prioritizes patients not only by their initial urgency level but also by their waiting time. Selecting elective surgery patients requires a balance between the waiting time for urgent patients and that for less urgent patients. The problem is formulated as an infinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Further, the study proposes a scheduling procedure based on structural properties of an optimal policy by taking a sampling-based finite horizon approximation approach. Finally, we examine the performance of the policy under various conditions.

Keywords

Waiting list managementtime-dependent priorityadverse events while waitingMarkov Decision Process
Type
Research Article
Information
RAIRO - Operations Research , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 53 - 74
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, ROADEF, SMAI, 2013

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