用预测提前申请床位,显著减少急诊患者候床时间。
Proactive Inpatient Bed Requests for Emergency Department Admissions

- 基于患者预判和床位状态,提前发起床位申请。
- 可减少30%-70%的候床时间,整体住院时长缩短6%-15%。
- 新斯沃型策略平衡效率与床位闲置,适合注重稳定的医院。
急诊科(ED)候床是指已决定入院的患者在急诊科等待住院床位的现象。候床是导致急诊拥堵的主要原因,并与不良患者结局相关。本文提出一种框架,利用当前患者信息和床位可用性,提前发起住院床位请求,以减少候床时间和住院总时长。将问题建模为马尔可夫决策过程,通过聚合每位患者的入院概率和处置时间预测,指导早期床位申请。据此设计三种数据驱动策略:近似动态规划、强化学习及新型报童型方法。基于大型急诊科数据的仿真显示,主动集中式床位请求可使已入院患者平均候床时间降低30%-70%,所有急诊患者平均住院时长缩短6%-15%,同时仅带来适度的住院床位空置时间。报童型启发法在急诊效率与床位空置间提供最优权衡;而强化学习方法在需要下游流程稳定时表现出更平稳的请求模式。研究说明,通过预测工具进行前瞻性床位申请,可在提升急诊运行效率的同时,帮助管理者平衡延迟削减与床位闲置之间的矛盾。结果也表明,评估简单短视启发式与更复杂的强化学习方法各有优势,具体取决于管理目标与实施约束。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Emergency department (ED) boarding occurs when admitted patients remain in the ED while awaiting inpatient beds. Boarding is a major driver of ED crowding and has been associated with poor patient outcomes. We propose a framework to help EDs reduce boarding time and length of stay by using information about current patients and bed availability to proactively request inpatient beds before admission decisions are finalized. We formulate the problem as a Markov decision process in which predictions of each patient's admission probability and time to disposition are aggregated to guide early inpatient bed requests. This formulation leads to three data-driven policies based on approximate dynamic programming, reinforcement learning, and a newsvendor-type approach. Using a simulation model based on data from a large ED, we evaluate these policies across a wide range of settings. The simulation study shows that proactive aggregate bed requests can reduce average boarding times for admitted patients by 30-70\% and average length of stay for all ED patients by 6-15\%, while creating only modest idle time for prepared inpatient beds. The newsvendor heuristic provides the most attractive tradeoff between ED performance and inpatient bed idle time, whereas the reinforcement learning heuristic produces smoother bed-request patterns when stability in downstream hospital processes is especially important. Our work shows how EDs can use prediction tools to make proactive bed-request decisions that improve ED operations while helping managers balance reductions in ED delays against inpatient bed idle time. Our findings also illustrate the value of evaluating both simple myopic heuristics and more sophisticated reinforcement learning-based approaches, since each can offer distinct advantages depending on the performance measures and implementation constraints most important to managers.
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