Application Study Of Queuing Theory In Hospital Operations Management

In recent years,with the improvement of people’s income,the change of health awareness and the implementation of the healthcare reform,people’s requirements for medical health are gradually increasing.In order to meet the growing health needs of the country,the healthcare expenditure in various countries has also increased year by year.At the same time,it is urgent to improve the efficiency of the healthcare system.China has made great achievements in the construction project for heathcare since the reform and opening up.However,due to the relatively backward history,its large population and other real situations,Chinese healthcare area still has many problems to be solved.Chinese heathcare service system is often criticized for the low healthcare expenditure,the high proportion of personal expenditure in healthcare expenditure,etc.The significance of the construction project for healthcare is unquestionable,and there is a long way to go in the futrue.Although Chinese healthcare area has developed rapidly and related macro-policies are improved,there are relatively few studies on healthcare operations management.This paper attempts to apply queueing theory to hospital op-erations management and then improve operations management in the healthcare area.The main contents of the research are as follows:The research backgrounds of the thesis,relevant academic achievements both in domestic and overseas,and the structure and the stream of the research are introduced in Chapter 1.Besides,several concepts and theorems are summarized,which will lay the foundation of the research.Overflow in emergency departments,priority upgrades in emergency departments,waiting room design for outpatient departments and bed allocation are considered in Chapter 2,3,4 and 5,respectively.Firstly,we establish an overflow model serving two types of patients.Because,for an emergency patient,if healthcare service providers are busy in the hospital,he or she will immediately go to other hospitals instead of waiting in the queue.Besides,we obtain the stationary distribution,loss probability and malposition probability,and investigate the impact of system parameters on the loss probability and malposition probability.Secondly,the severity of the patient’s condition usually determines the priority of service in hospital emergency departments.We simplify the emegency service system as a single server queueing system with two types of patients and priority upgrades.Then,we exam-ine the stationary distribution of the system and design an algorithm to calculate the stationary distribution of the system.In addition,the impact of system parameters on system performance measures is also analyzed.Thirdly,we consider the waiting room design problem for outpatient departments when patients are accompanied on visits to their doctors.Finally,queuing theory is used to establish a multi-class stochastic model.Based on this model,we use optimizaiton approaches to address the bed allocation prob-lem and use real data to test the validity of the results.At the end of the paper,the main results of this paper are summarized,we em-phasize its creation and shortcomings,and point out the possible directions of future research.The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of queuing theory in hospi-tal operations management.I hope our attempt may sheld lights on hospital operations management in China.The gaps of this research are:(1)We quantitatively analyze the patient overflow model and the probability of malposition.(2)We use the queueing system with priority upgrade to capture the prioritry change of patients in the emegency department and design an algorithm to calculate the stationary distribution and perfor-mance measures of the corresponding queueing system.(3)We have addressed the problem of waiting room design for outpatient departments when patients are accompa-nied by other people and apply matrix analytic methods to obtain analytical results for the more general case.(4)We examine the bed allocation problem considering the pa-tient overflow and apply optimization theory to study the bed allocation policy.Finally,real data is used to test the validity of the results.