Events Calendar

Epstein ISE Faculty Candidate Seminar

Speaker: Pengyi Shi, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

Talk Title: "Data-driven Modeling and Decisions for Hospital Inpatient Flow Management"

Abstract: Emergency department (ED) overcrowding negatively impacts patient safety and public health, and hence, has become one of the most challenging problems facing healthcare delivery systems worldwide. It is known that prolonged waiting time for admitted patients to be transferred from ED to inpatient beds (i.e., ED boarding) is a key contributor to ED overcrowding. Our research focuses on gaining insights into effective inpatient flow management to reduce this waiting time, and eventually, to reduce ED overcrowding.

Based on an extensive empirical study of a Singaporean hospital, we build a new stochastic network model of inpatient flow. The model contains several novel features including the service times being endogenous, and these features are critical for the model to predict the time-dependent empirical performance measures such as the hourly average waiting time and the fraction of patients waiting more than 6 hours. By simulating the stochastic model, we identify certain operational policies that can reduce ED boarding and eliminate the excessively long waiting times for patients requesting beds in the morning. These policies focus on discharging patients at an earlier time of the day. The model also allows one to study the impact of other operational policies including staffing and expanding step-down-care facilities on ED boarding. To obtain structural insights, we further develop a novel “two-time-scale” analytical framework to analyze the model. This framework overcomes many challenges, including the service times being extremely long compared to the time-variations of the arrival rate, faced by existing methods for large-scale queuing systems. In addition to exact analysis, we employ a heavy-traffic approximation. Finally, we discuss future directions for research and practice.


Host: Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

More Information: Seminar-Shi_Pengyi.doc

Location: Ronald Tutor Hall of Engineering (RTH) - Room 526

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Georgia Lum