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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences

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 Mar 2009

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 …


Uncompensated Care Cost: A Pilot Study Using Hospitals In A Texas County, Alberto Coustasse, Andrea L. Lorden, Vishal Nemarugommula, Karan P. Singh Jan 2009

Uncompensated Care Cost: A Pilot Study Using Hospitals In A Texas County, Alberto Coustasse, Andrea L. Lorden, Vishal Nemarugommula, Karan P. Singh

Management Faculty Research

The financial ramifications of uncompensated care cost (UCC) on the healthcare industry have been difficult to quantify. With the lack of a standardized definition of uncompensated care and the need to account for the uninsured, indigent, and immigrant populations, the authors identified $190 million of UCC from Southwestern border hospitals for emergency room treatment of undocumented immigrants and $934 million of uncompensated care charges for 23 hospitals in a Texas county, which translated to $353 million of UCC. Although lawmakers passed the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act (2003) to address the growing imbalance, the shortfall of funds highlights …