Optimising healthcare queues: a case study on chronic respiratory illness

Gillard, Jonathan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9166-298X, Knight, Vincent ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4245-0638, Smith, Kendal and Wilde, Henry 2025. Optimising healthcare queues: a case study on chronic respiratory illness. IMA Journal of Management Mathematics 36 (2) , pp. 255-274. 10.1093/imaman/dpaf002

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Abstract

This study employs a data-driven approach to assess the evolving resource needs of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients, exploring the impact on the hospital system. It integrates segmentation, operational queuing theory and parameter recovery from incomplete data to overcome limitations in fine-grained data availability, yielding operational insights using only administrative data. Initiating with a population clustering from granular data, the paper utilizes a multi-class model, extracting parameters through parameterization and Wasserstein distance. This model facilitates an informative analysis of the queuing system and population needs through various what-if scenarios. The comprehensive analyses encompass all patient arrival types, revealing that addressing the impact of COPD patients on the system necessitates more than just expanding capacity. Our work demonstrates the potential for specific improvement in clinical performance in respect of COPD patients.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Mathematics
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	1471-678X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 January 2025
Date of Acceptance:	6 January 2025
Last Modified:	11 Jul 2025 12:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175202

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