Qian Cheng
4-4:20 pm Aggregate Early Bed Requests for Admitted Patients in an Emergency Department Abstract: Long emergency department (ED) boarding is associated with adverse patient health outcomes and leads to ED crowding. The current practice is to request hospital beds for admitted patients only after their ED service has ended, and the transfer preparation process (TPP) starts only after a suitable hospital bed has been located. One possible way to shorten the boarding times is to predict patient admissions and make early bed requests for patients who are highly likely to be admitted, and thereby parallelize the ED service and TPP. In this work, we use stochastic modeling to propose a framework to make aggregate early bed request decisions based on the state of ED patients and hospital beds. Proposed policies are evaluated and compared by means of a simulation model populated with data from an academic hospital in US.

Nikolai Lipscomb
4:20-4:40 pm Optimal Asymptomatic Testing Under Limited Test Supply Abstract: We examine the problem of a patient choosing when to use COVID tests when the supply of tests is limited. We consider a partially observable Markov decision process where the only observable states are whether symptoms are observed or not. Under various model assumptions, we are able to analytically derive optimal policies as we prove structural results of the model.

Puyao Ge
4:40-5 pm Optimal Vaccination Rollout Policies Abstract: We consider how to schedule the release of limited vaccine supply to several distinct groups within a finite population with different utility for the vaccine. We obtain the structural results of the optimal policies and show that these policies are applicable to several other situations such as online sales.

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