Patient Admission and Scheduling under Multiple Resource Constraints

We consider a patient admission problem to a hospital with multiple potential bottlenecks (e.g. beds and OR). While there is an uncontrolled arrival process of emergency patients, the hospital has the freedom to postpone or even reject the admission of non-emergency patients. We model the control process as a Markov Decision Process and suggest price-directed heuristics.

Christiane Barz is an assistant professor of the Decisions, Operations & Technology Management group. Prior to joining UCLA Anderson, she spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher with the Operations Management group at the Chicago Booth School of Business. Professor Barz holds a doctorate degree and a diploma in industrial engineering from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.

Her main research interests are revenue management, dynamic pricing, healthcare services, inventory theory, and production scheduling. In her dissertation, she analyzed the impact of an airline's risk-attitude on the availability of low-cost tickets. The thesis was published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems and won several prizes including the dissertation prize of the German Operations Research Society 2007. Recent projects focus on the solution of large-scale dynamic optimization problems using approximate dynamic programming techniques. She applies these methods in production scheduling and healthcare applications.