The optimal allocation model of doctor's surgical time in China's Large Public Hospital

摘要

We study an inventory system in which a doctor provides service for two patient types over a main surgery day of T periods. As the horizon starts, patient demands arrive in each period, for either type of patients, following a stationary Poisson process with random service time. The model we consider is the doctor may choose to provide service on that main surgery day, or may choose to next main surgery day. The doctor's decision is whether to accept the patients' requests in each period throughout the horizon. With a stochastic dynamic programming formulation, we first prove the concavity of the value function, which facilitates the definition to the optimal thresholds. We then establish the monotonicity of the thresholds. Our research provides a theoretical support for doctors' decisions.