title: Modelling patient duration of stay to facilitate resource management of geriatric hospitals.
abstract: A fundamental aspect of health care management is the effective allocation of resources. This is of particular importance in geriatric hospitals where elderly patients tend to have more complex needs. Hospital managers would benefit immensely if they had advance knowledge of patient duration of stay in hospital. Managers could assess the costs of patient care and make allowances for these in their budget. In this paper. we tackle this important problem via a model which predicts the duration of stay distribution of patients in hospital. The approach uses phase-type distributions conditioned on a Bayesian belief network.
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland. a.h.marshall@qub.ac.uk
authors.forename: A H
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Marshall
authors.forename: S I
authors.initials: SI
authors.lastname: McClean
authors.forename: C M
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Shapcott
authors.forename: P H
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Millard
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D015577:Geriatric Assessment / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D015276:Health Care Rationing; D006782:Hospitals, Special / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007902:Length of Stay / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D017146:Models, Organizational; D013222:State Medicine; D016019:Survival Analysis; D006113:United Kingdom