Dynamic Patient Scheduling in Hospitals

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on treatment scheduling for patients in hospitals. Scheduling and coordinating patients in hospitals is faced with a high amount of complexity due to the inherent dynamics of the processes and the distributed organisational structure of hospitals. To this end, our multi-agent system MedPAge (Medical Path Agents) is presented, in which patients and hospital resources are represented as autonomous agents. For coordination, our market mechanism MedPaCo (Medical Path Coordination) is described, in which the patient agents negotiate with each other based upon individual health state dependent cost functions over the scarce hospital resources. To incorporate stochastic processing times, a decision theoretic approach is introduced in which delays are viewed as risk by the patient agents. Further, a first approach to handle variable pathways is given. Finally, we describe a hospital simulation system which allows the benchmark of different coordination mechanisms including the current practice in hospitals.