Improving patient flow in emergency department through dynamic priority queue

• Main Authors: TAN, Kar Way, WANG, Chao, LAU, Hoong Chuin
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; Medicine and Health Sciences
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3317; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4319/viewcontent/ImprovingPatientFlowEmergencyDepartment_2012_CASE.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Most queuing problems are based on FIFO, LIFO, or static priority queues; very few address dynamic priority queues. In this paper, we present a case in a hospital’s emergency department (ED) where the queuing process can be modeled as a time-varying M/M/s queue with re-entrant patients. In order to improve patient flow in the department, we propose the use of a dynamic priority queue to dispatch patients to consultation with doctors. We test our proposed model using simulation and our experimental results show that a dynamic priority queue is effective in reducing the length of stay (LOS) of patients and hence improving patient flow. Furthermore, we show that a hybrid scheme is effective in preventing starvation.