A Markov Decision Process model for elective inpatient admission with delay announcement

This paper investigates the improvement of the hospitalization admission process of elective inpatients by offering delay announcement to free patients from blind and long wait. We propose a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model for optimization of delay announcement strategies by taking into account patients´ behavior with respect to waiting for hospitalization. Numerical experiments are conducted to study the hospital dominant case in which the delay announcement only tries to maximize the revenue of the hospital. Properties of the optimal delay announcement strategies were observed and conjectured.