An Approximate Dynamic Programming Approach for Patient and Process Prioritization in A Hospital Environment

This research tackles the problem of patient and process prioritization in a healthcare environment with limited resources. Considering the medical cardiology department of a large medical center, a holistic model is designed and developed towards optimizing the decisions of allocating the available resources to the patients in order to minimize patients’ waiting costs. Approximate Dynamic Programming techniques are applied to optimize the aforementioned decisions over time, as well as capture the heterogeneity of the patients.