Multi-criteria decision-making for collaborative COVID-19 surge management and inter-hospital patients’ transfer optimisation
本文识别了医院间COVID-19患者转运标准，用多准则决策方法排序并确定优先级，再建立优化模型实现患者从饱和医院向接收医院的系统转诊，结合法国真实数据验证了方案能避免系统饱和并减少被拒患者。
The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus and the massive influx of patients exceeded the intensive care units capacity limit. Hospitals have engaged community partners to request resources or transfer patients to facilities with available resources. This setting fosters the need for rationing decisions to allocate scarce resources consistently, rather than basing decisions on clinicians’ intuition in the heat of the moment. In this paper, we identify the inter-hospital COVID-19 patients’ transfer criteria, and we apply a multi-criteria decision-making methodology to classify and rank these criteria in order to determine the transfer priority scores between hospitals. We then develop an optimisation model for patient systematic referral from saturated to recipient hospitals with contingency capacity expansion and a ventilator donation scheme. To deal with the uncertainty related to the number of ill patients requesting beds in hospitals, a two-stage stochastic model is presented and solved using the sample average approximation. A case with real data related to the COVID-19 French context is presented, which allows us to assess the resilience of the hospital network under the proposed solutions. The results show how local and regional coalitions can avert the saturation of the hospital system and reduce the number of rejected patients.