Cope with the COVID-19 pandemic: Dynamic bed allocation and patient subsidization in a public healthcare system.

ABSTRACT: In many countries and territories, public hospitals play a major role in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. For public hospital managers, on the one hand, they must best utilize their hospital beds to serve the COVID-19 patients immediately. On the other hand, they need to consider the need of bed resources from non-COVID-19 patients, including emergency and elective patients. In this work, we consider two control mechanisms for public hospital managers to maximize the overall utility of patients. One is the dynamic allocation of bed resources according to the evolution process of the COVID-19 pandemic. The other is the usage of a subsidy scheme to move elective patients from the public to private hospitals. We develop a dynamic programming model to study the allocation of isolation and or

SUBMITTER: Ma X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8489298 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature