Patient Triage and Prioritization Under Austere Conditions

In war zones and economically deprived regions, because of extreme resource restrictions, a single provider may be the sole person in charge of providing emergency care to a group of patients. An important question the provider faces under such circumstances is whether or not to perform triage and how to prioritize the patients. By choosing to triage a particular patient, the provider can determine the health condition and thus the urgency of the patient, but that will come at the expense of delaying the actual service (stabilization or initial treatment) for that patient as well as all the other patients. Motivated by this problem, which also arises in other service contexts, we consider a service system where finitely many patients, all available at time zero, belong to one of the two possible triage classes, where each class is characterized by its waiting cost and expected service time. Patients’ class identities are initially unknown, but the service provider has the option to spend time on triage to...