Improving patient length-of-stay in emergency department through dynamic queue management

• Main Authors: TAN, Kar Way, LAU, Hoong Chuin, LEE, Francis Chun Yue
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Medicine and Health Sciences; Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1935; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2934/viewcontent/06._WSC2013_Improving_patient_LOS_in_ED_through_Dynamic_Queue_Management.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Addressing issue of crowding in an Emergency Department (ED) typically takes the form of process engineering or single-faceted queue management strategies such as demand restriction, queue prioritization or staffing the ED. This work provides an integrated framework to manage queue dynamically from both demand and supply perspectives. More precisely, we introduce intelligent dynamic patient prioritization strategies to manage the demand concurrently with dynamic resource adjustment policies to manage supply. Our framework allows decision-makers to select both the demand-side and supply-side strategies to suit the needs of their ED. We verify through a simulation that such a framework improves the patients' length-of-stay in the ED without restricting the demand.