Paper Info
Title
Real Time Access Control Of Patient Service In The Pediatrics Department
Abstract
Motivated by patients' increasing demand and inevitable uncomfortable waiting for the scarce healthcare service, we develop a real-time automatic appointment scheduling (AS) policy considering both the difference and fairness among heterogeneous types of patients. This paper discusses the AS system based on the assumption of independent but non-identical patient arrivials with independent and identically distributed random service durations. The AS policy chooses the patient for the next diagnosis from the waiting pool automatically to minimize the expected total "disutility" according to the current system state. We construct a continuous-time Markov Decision Process (MDP) in a finite horizon to formulate the AS system. Through mathematical analysis the myopic optimal policy and a "switching-curve" are derived in this paper. In the numerical experiment, a case based on the Pediatric clinic of the Peking University Third Hospital (PUTH) is investigated by constructing a simulation model of the AS system. Three heuristic policies along with the myopic policy are testified in both the Markovian settings and the real-world scenario. Our simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the myopic policy that the total "disutility" of patients can be greatly alleviated.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2015
2015 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTOMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING (CASE)
Appointment scheduling, Markov decision process, patient utility, myopic policy, healthcare management
Field
DocType
ISSN
Health care,Heuristic,Actuarial science,Markov process,Computer science,Scheduling (computing),Markov decision process,Operations research,Access control,Independent and identically distributed random variables,Health administration
Conference
2161-8070
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yunzhe Qiu181.51
Jie Song2910.11
Zekun Liu381.18