Research On Emergency Department Healthcare Resources Management With Nonstationary Demand

The Emergency Department(ED)often deals with time-varying demand.At the time of ED congestion,patients suffer from long waiting time while physicians work under pressure.Thus,a good ED scheduling plan is of great importance for ED service quality improvement and patients’ wait time reduction.The Markov-chain-based uniformization method is proposed to evaluate the patients’ total wait time and the status of the non-stationary ED system with time-varying demand.Then,a mixed integer program model and a tabu search heuristic are designed to offer flexible weekly scheduling plans for ED physicians based on the real-life constraints of the problems.A comparison between the algorithmic results and the lower bound calculated by the linearized MIP model as well as the actual physician schedules are proposed in the numerical experiments to prove the superiority of the method.Based on the reality of re-entry patients in ED,the proposed evaluation method is modified and algorithms are designed to solve the ED weekly scheduling problem under this particular circumstance.The methods proposed in this research may give insight in terms of hospital management.