| Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding is a common problem occurring in US hospitals. Presenting a barrier to safe and timely delivery of healthcare, hospitals address ED overcrowding by diverting ambulances to the nearest available facility. This leads to a delay in delivery of care for patients and a loss in revenue for the hospitals. In this work, a Petri-net model of a hospital is developed, and simulation modeling is used to help develop heuristic control policies that improve patient care and hospital profits.The benefit of using control policies is highlighted, and a related stochastic control problem which will yield the optimal policy is discussed. |
