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Managing a patient waiting list with time-dependent priorityand 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 todecide the number of patients selected from the waiting list and to schedule them inaccordance with the operating room capacity in the next period. The waiting listprioritizes patients not only by their initial urgency level but also by their waitingtime. Selecting elective surgery patients requires a balance between the waiting time forurgent patients and that for less urgent patients. The problem is formulated as aninfinite horizon Markov Decision Process. Further, the study proposes a schedulingprocedure based on structural properties of an optimal policy by taking a sampling-basedfinite horizon approximation approach. Finally, we examine the performance of the policyunder 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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