Patient prioritization in cardiac catheterization labs

Title : Patient prioritization in cardiac catheterization labs
Authors :
Conference : 30th EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
Date: June 23 - June 26, 2019

This research tackles the problem of prioritizing patients who are waiting to go through procedures performed in a cardiac catheterization lab. Considering the set of cardiac catheterization labs in the cardiology department of a large medical center, where both outpatients and inpatients use the same resources, and different types of procedures take place in the same location, a model is designed and developed towards minimizing the waiting costs of the patients while maximizing the utilization of the resources. Outpatients and inpatients have different priorities resulting from the different objectives of each type of patient. Nevertheless, on the day of the procedure the priorities may change in an effort to create a more efficient schedule. The proposed model takes into account the uncertainty in the duration of the procedures as well as delays resulting from the unpreparedness of the outpatients to go through the procedure on the day of the appointment. An Approximate Dynamic Programming approach is used to prioritize the patients through the different steps they are required to complete.