Analysis of patient flow in emergency department based on Markov chain

Abstract

In this article, we present a study on patient flow conducted in the emergency department of a typical hospital. Based on results of a kind of critical disease predicted by statistical analysis software and the theoretical basis of the Markov chain, a Markov chain model for forecasting patient flow in the emergency department has been developed. The authors focus on expounding the principle of this model and comparing subsequent real-world results with those predicted by the model. This paper is intended to predict the trend of patient flow in ED, find the maximum flow path and the patient proportion on each path, provide a theoretical basis to find the resource consumption of each process on the path to identify peaks and troughs. The Markov chain model showed the law of patients' transfer, it can play a good role for the effective allocation of resources of the hospital. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.