Jonathan Patrick Receives $90,000 from NSERC

Large Scale Markov Decision Processes in Healthcare Management is the title of Assistant Professor Jonathan Patrick’s research project that was awarded $90,000 by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

The purpose of this research is to develop a mathematical framework for solving large scale stochastic decision problems and capacity planning within the healthcare management. Such decisions include the scheduling of patients to a resource and the decisions around hospital congestion and ward capacity. A shortage of resources in Canadian hospitals is a chronic and steadily worsening challenge making the efficient use of available resources increasingly critical. The overall contributions are in the practical application to healthcare management as well as the discovery of fundamental insights into the nature of decision policies and capacity planning and the improvement of approximate dynamic programming (ADP).