Optimal Hospital Care Scheduling During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic

4/14/22 | 4:15pm | E25-111


 

 

 

 

Wolfram Wiesemann

Professor of Analytics and Operations
Imperial College London


Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has seen dramatic demand surges for hospital care that have placed a severe strain on health systems worldwide. As a result, policy makers are faced with the challenge of managing scarce hospital capacity so as to reduce the backlog of non-COVID patients whilst maintaining the ability to respond to any potential future increases in demand for COVID care. In this talk, we propose a nation-wide prioritization scheme that models each individual patient as a dynamic program whose states encode the patient's health and treatment condition, whose actions describe the available treatment options, whose transition probabilities characterize the stochastic evolution of the patient's health and whose rewards encode the contribution to the overall objectives of the health system. The individual patients' dynamic programs are coupled through constraints on the available resources, such as hospital beds, doctors and nurses. We show that near-optimal solutions to the emerging weakly coupled counting dynamic program can be found through a fluid approximation that gives rise to a linear program whose size grows gracefully in the problem dimensions. Our case study for the National Health Service in England shows how years of life can be gained and costs reduced by prioritizing specific disease types over COVID patients, such as injury & poisoning, diseases of the respiratory system, diseases of the circulatory system, diseases of the digestive system and cancer.

Bio: Wolfram Wiesemann is a Professor of Analytics and Operations as well as a Fellow of the KPMG Centre for Advanced Business Analytics at Imperial College Business School. Wolfram currently serves as area editor for Operations Research Letters and as associate editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, Mathematical Programming, Operations Research and SIAM Journal on Optimization. His research interests revolve around the methodological aspects of decision-making under uncertainty, as well as applications in logistics, energy and healthcare.

Event Time: 

2022 - 16:15