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Dynamic Multipriority Patient Scheduling for a Diagnostic Resource

Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 6N5
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2
patrick{at}telfer.uottawa.ca
martin.puterman{at}sauder.ubc.ca
maurice.queyranne{at}sauder.ubc.ca

We present a method to dynamically schedule patients with different priorities to a diagnostic facility in a public health-care setting. Rather than maximizing revenue, the challenge facing the resource manager is to dynamically allocate available capacity to incoming demand to achieve wait-time targets in a cost-effective manner. We model the scheduling process as a Markov decision process. Because the state space is too large for a direct solution, we solve the equivalent linear program through approximate dynamic programming. For a broad range of cost parameter values, we present analytical results that give the form of the optimal linear value function approximation and the resulting policy. We investigate the practical implications and the quality of the policy through simulation.

Subject classifications: health care; approximate dynamic programming; Markov decision processes; patient scheduling; linear programming.
History: Received November 2006; revision received March 2008; accepted April 2008.