Real-time Elective Admissions Planning for Health Care Providers
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Date
2013-01-23T21:37:48Z
Authors
Zhu, George
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
Efficient management of patient admissions plays a critical role in increasing a hospital's
resource utilization and reducing health care costs. We consider the problem of fi nding the
best available admission policy for elective hospital admissions under real time constraints.
The problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and we investigate current
state-of-the art real time planning methods.
Due to the complexity of the model, traditional mode-based planners are limited in scalability
since they require an explicit enumeration of the model dynamics. To overcome this challenge,
we apply sample-based planners along with efficient simulation techniques that given an
initial start state, generate an action on-demand while avoiding portions of the model
that are irrelevant to the start state.
Results show that given reasonable resources, our approach generates improved deci-
sions over existing alternatives that fail to scale as model complexity increases. We also
propose a parameter tuning method that can be easily and efficiently implemented.