Admission Control of Multi-Level Emergency Patients with Time-Varying Demands

Abstract

The Markov decision process (MDP) model is developed for the patient admission control problem and is extended based on the uniformization method to realize a real-time period-by-period decision process. The classical MDP iterative method is extended, and the two-way iteration algorithm and the two-way threshold iteration algorithm are proposed to solve the new model. Numerical experiments are conducted based on the data from the resuscitation room of a large hospital in Shanghai. The results show that the proposed method can improve the admission rate of critical patients and enhance the medical service level of the hospital compared with the existing decision method.

Keywords

• patient admission control
• markov decision process(mdp)
• uniformization method
• time-varying demands