Real-time Elective Admissions Planning for Health Care Providers

[摘要] Efficient management of patient admissions plays a critical role in increasing a hospital;;sresource utilization and reducing health care costs. We consider the problem of fi nding thebest available admission policy for elective hospital admissions under real time constraints.The problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and we investigate currentstate-of-the art real time planning methods.Due to the complexity of the model, traditional mode-based planners are limited in scalabilitysince 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 alsopropose a parameter tuning method that can be easily and efficiently implemented.

[发布机构] University of Waterloo

[关键词] Computer Science