Seminar by Beste Kucukyazici

Seminar by

 

Beste Kucukyazici
Assistant Professor
Desautels Faculty of Management
McGill University

 

We study patient admission policies in acute care wards recognizing multiple patient types with different medical characteristics. Recent studies have shown that patients who need acute care are more effectively treated in specialized inpatient settings. The benefits of such specialized care, however, might be offset by long boarding times at the emergency department due to bed unavailability at the ward. This research is inspired by the managerial challenges at the neurology ward of Montreal Neurological Hospital (MNH), where the optimal care pathway for patients with neurological diseases is particularly time-sensitive.

 

We model the patient admission and bed allocation problem using an average cost dynamic programming framework. By solving the dynamic program, we determine the dynamic admission policy that provides the best care for all patients in light of limited bed availability. We present an integrated solution approach, which combines queuing methods and approximate dynamic programming. We compare the performance of the proposed policy with that of other heuristic admission policies. Our approach also has some implications for similar general multi-class queuing problems. This is joint work with Saied Samiedaluie and Vedat Verter of McGill University, and Dan Zhang of the University of Colorado at Boulder.