Stochastic optimal control for avoiding emergency department divert
Conference Paper
Overview
Overview
abstract
Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding is a common problem occurring in US hospitals. Presenting a barrier to safe and timely delivery of healthcare, hospitals address ED overcrowding by diverting ambulances to the nearest available facility. This leads to a delay in healthcare delivery and a loss in revenue. In this paper, we develop a Petri-net model of a hospital, and use simulation to help develop heuristic control policies that improve patient care and hospital profits. We highlight the benefit of using control policies, and discuss a related stochastic control problem which will yield the optimal policy.
