On Fair Routing from Emergency Departments to Hospital Wards: QED Queues with Heterogeneous Servers Academic Article

abstract

• The interface between an emergency department and internal wards is often a hospital's bottleneck. Motivated by this interaction in an anonymous hospital, we analyze queueing systems with heterogeneous server pools, where the pools represent the wards, and the servers are beds. Our queueing system, with a single centralized queue and several server pools, forms an inverted-V model. We introduce the randomized most-idle (RMI) routing policy and analyze it in the quality- and efficiency-driven regime, which is natural in our setting. The RMI policy results in the same server fairness (measured by idleness ratios) as the longest-idle-server-first (LISF) policy, which is commonly used in call centers and considered fair. However, the RMI policy utilizes only the information on the number of idle servers in different pools, whereas the LISF policy requires information that is unavailable in hospitals on a real-time basis. This paper was accepted by Assaf Zeevi, stochastic models and simulation.

authors

• Momcilovic, Petar

published proceedings

• MANAGEMENT SCIENCE

author list (cited authors)

• Mandelbaum, A., Momcilovic, P., & Tseytlin, Y.

citation count

• 70

complete list of authors

• Mandelbaum, Avishai||Momcilovic, Petar||Tseytlin, Yulia

publication date

• January 2012

publisher

• Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)  Publisher

published in

• Management science  Journal

keywords

• Asymptotic Analysis
• Fairness
• Healthcare
• Heterogeneous Servers
• Hospital Routing Policies
• Quality- And Efficiency-driven Regime
• Queueing Systems

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1287/mnsc.1110.1491

start page

• 1273

end page

• 1291

volume

• 58

issue

• 7

URL

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1110.1491