What causes delays in admission to rehabilitation care? A structural estimation approach
Jing Dong1, Berk Gorgulu2, Vahid Sarhangian2
1Decision, Risk, and Operations, Columbia Business School; 2Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Canada
Discussant: Christopher Chen (Indiana University)
Delays in admission to rehabilitation care can be both capacity-driven and/or due to processing delays. Standard data however only includes a single measure of delay, and the bed allocation decisions in practice do not follow a systematic policy. We propose a hidden Markov model to estimate the processing times and the status-quo bed allocation policy. We validate our structural model and conduct counterfactual experiments to evaluate various operational interventions aimed at reducing delays.