Surgery scheduling of pelvic fracture patients with stochastic recovery time.

Pelvic fracture is a severe trauma and is often seen in the traffic accidents, which are associated with complications or multiple injuries. Surgery is the main treatment for patients with serious conditions, while conservative treatment is adopted for older or minor-illness patients. Surgery resources, such as doctors, nurses, and operating rooms, are shared by all pelvic fracture patients. From the perspective of patient state, this paper divides patients who require surgery into two types, convalescent patients and scheduled patients. Convalescent patients' life states are always unstable, and they require recovery time to meet the condition of surgery. The recovery time is usually stochastic due to different patient situations. Scheduled patients have stable life states, and the pelvic fracture surgical plan is scheduled days or weeks in advance. Considering the characteristics of the two types of patients, a finite-horizon Markov decision process (MDP) model is established. With data collected from the hospital, parameters are set and experiments are designed to reveal the dynamic priority rules for receiving patients into surgery. Performances of different scenarios are compared, and the optimal policies obtained from the MDP are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]