Robust Multi-Class Multi-Period Scheduling of MRI Services with Wait Time Targets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, long wait times for healthcare services have become a challenge in most healthcare delivery systems in Canada. This issue becomes even more important when there are priorities in patients' treatment which means some of the patients need emergency treatment, while others can wait longer. One example of excessively long wait times in Canada is the MRI scans. These wait times are partially due to limited capacity and increased demand, but also due to sub-optimal scheduling policies. Patients are typically prioritized by the referring physician based on their health condition, and there is a wait time target for each priority level. The difficulty of scheduling increases due to uncertainty in patients' arrivals and service times. In this thesis, we develop a multi-priority robust optimization (RO) method to schedule patients for MRI services over a multi-period finite horizon. First, we present a deterministic mixed integer programming model which considers patient priorities, MRI capacity, and wait time targets for each priority level. We then investigate robust counterparts of the model by considering uncertainty in patients' arrivals and employing the notion of the budget of uncertainty. Finally, we apply the proposed robust model to a set of numerical examples and compare the results with those of the non-robust method. Moreover, sensitivity analysis is performed over capacity, penalty cost, service level, and budget of uncertainty. Our results demonstrate that the proposed robust approach provides solutions with higher service levels for each priority, and lower patients' wait time in realistic problem instances. The analysis also provides some insights on expanding capacity and choosing the budget of uncertainty as a trade-off between performance and conservatism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".