Impact of Prioritization on the Outpatient Queuing System in the Emergency Department with Limited Medical Resources

The emergency department has an irreplaceable role in the hospital service system because of the characteristics of its emergency services. In this paper, a new patient queuing model with priority weight is proposed to optimize the management of emergency department services. Compared with classical queuing rules, the proposed model takes into consideration the key factors of service and the first-come-first-served queuing rule in emergency services. According to some related queuing indicators, the optimization of emergency services is discussed. Finally, a case study and some compared analysis are conducted to illustrate the practicability of the proposed model.

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