Patient Prioritization in Cardiac Catheterization Labs

Title : Patient Prioritization in Cardiac Catheterization Labs
Authors :
Conference : INFORMS Annual Meeting 2019
Date: October 20 - October 23, 2019

This research tackles the problem of prioritizing patients waiting to go through a cardiac catheterization lab. Considering cardiac catheterization labs in a hospital, where outpatients, inpatients, and emergency patients use the same resources, a model is designed and developed towards minimizing the patients’ waiting costs. While outpatients are given a higher priority, this may change on the day of the procedure in order to improve efficiency. The model takes into account the uncertainty in the duration of each step that the patients go though as well as delays resulting from the unpreparedness of the outpatients. An Approximate Dynamic Programming approach is used to prioritize the patients.