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Or Practice—Efficient Short-Term Allocation And Reallocation Of Patients To Floors Of A Hospital During Demand Surges, Steven M. Thompson, Manuel Nunez, Robert Garfinkel, Matthew D. Dean

Management Faculty Publications

Many hospitals face the problem of insufficient capacity to meet demand for inpatient beds, especially during demand surges. This results in quality degradation of patient care due to large delays from admission time to the hospital until arrival at a floor. In addition, there is loss of revenue because of the inability to provide service to potential patients. A solution to the problem is to proactively transfer patients between floors in anticipation of a demand surge. Optimal reallocation poses an extraordinarily complex problem that can be modeled as a finite-horizon Markov decision process. Based on the optimization model, a decision-support …