Continuous-time Markov models for geriatric patient behaviour

A Continuous Time Markov Model for the Length of Stay of Elderly People in Institutional Long-Term Care

“…Methods that explicitly model the survival time (or the LOS in care) of elderly people have consistently shown that a mixture of exponentials gives a good fit to observed LOS data (Harrison and Millard, 1991;McClean and Millard, 1993;Taylor et al, 1998Taylor et al, , 2000. Struthers (1963) first reported that LOS in a hospital geriatric department in Southampton followed a combination of two exponential curves: one had a 'half-life' of 2 months and the other had a half-life of 2 years.…”

A hybrid genetic algorithm-queuing multi-compartment model for optimizing inpatient bed occupancy and associated costs

“…It is worth mentioning that there are situations better described by more than three compartments [8], [14,15].…”

Improving hospital bed occupancy and resource utilization through queuing modeling and evolutionary computation

“…169 The corresponding average number of customers in system. [12,20,21]. The situation describing the simplest but beds per year.…”

“…Compartmental models have previously been shown to provide 89 a suitable description of the patient flow through a hospital depart-90 ment, especially for geriatric medicine. Starting with a determinis-91 tic two-compartment mathematical model [10], further progress 92 occurred when stochastic models along with mixed exponential 93 distributions, continuous-time Markov model and Bayesian belief 94networks have been proposed[11][12][13][14].This paper proposes a flexible strategy to improve the hospital 96 management regarding its two main aspects: (a) bed allocation policy, and (b) financial resource utilization. First, it uses results from 98 queuing theory to model the patient flow, where a Poisson process 99 describes the patients' arrivals, hospital beds are servers, and the 100 length of stay is modeled using a phase-type distribution.…”