Health Care Management Science

, Volume 7, Issue 4, pp 285–289 | Cite as

Using Coxian Phase-Type Distributions to Identify Patient Characteristics for Duration of Stay in Hospital

Article

Abstract

Coxian phase-type distributions are a special type of Markov model that describes duration until an event occurs in terms of a process consisting of a sequence of latent phases. This paper considers the use of Coxian phase-type distributions for modelling patient duration of stay for the elderly in hospital and investigates the potential for using the resulting distribution as a classifying variable to identify common characteristics between different groups of patients according to their (anticipated) length of stay in hospital. The identification of common characteristics for patient length of stay groups would offer hospital managers and clinicians possible insights into the overall management and bed allocation of the hospital wards.

Keywords

stochastic modelling Coxian phase-type distributions Markov models survival analysis geriatric medicine 
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Copyright information

© Kluwer Academic Publishers 2004

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, David Bates BuildingQueen’s University of BelfastBelfastUK
  2. 2.School of Computing and Information Engineering, Faculty of InformaticsUniversity of UlsterUK

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