Managing Advance Admission Requests for Obstetric Care

This paper is devoted to the management of advance admission requests for obstetric care. Pregnant women in China select one hospital and request admission for both antenatal and postnatal care after nine weeks of pregnancy. Schedulers must make the admission decision instantly based on the availability of the most critical resource, that is, hospital beds for postnatal care. The random delay between admission requests and postnatal care has created a distinct advance admission control problem. To address this issue, we propose a basic model that assumes a unit bed requirement for one day. Each admission generates a unit of revenue and each unit of overcapacity use incurs an overcapacity cost. With the objective of maximizing the expected net revenue, we establish an optimal policy for unlimited requests, that is, an expected arrival time quota (EATQ) policy that accepts a fixed quota of advance admission requests with the same expected date of confinement. We then propose an extended model for general capacity requirements. Using the Poisson approximation, we establish the optimality of the EATQ policy, which is shown to be solvable by a simple linear programming model. We compare the numerical results from the different policies and conduct a sensitivity analysis. The EATQ policy is demonstrated to be the best option in all test instances and notably outperforms the current admission rules used in hospitals, which usually accept admission requests according to some empirical monthly quota of the expected delivery month. The Poisson approximation is shown to be effective for determining the optimal EATQ policy for both stationary and nonstationary arrivals. Summary of Contribution: First, this paper investigates the advance admission control problem for obstetric care. Pregnant women in China choose one hospital and request admission for both antenatal and postnatal care after nine weeks of pregnancy but the most critical resource is hospitalization beds needed for postnatal care. The random delay between admission request and postnatal care makes the problem unique and challenging to solve. It belongs to the scope of computing and operations research. Second, this paper formulates a dynamic programming model, analyzes the structural properties of the optimal control policy, and finally proposes a mathematical programming model to determine the optimal quota. Numerical experiments show the validity of the proposed approach. It covers the research contents of theories on dynamic stochastic control, mathematic programming model, and experiments. Moreover, this paper is motivated by the practical problem (advance admission control) in obstetric units of Shanghai. Using these optimality properties, solution approaches, and numerical results, this paper provides guidance on how to manage advance obstetric admission requests.