Purpose – Although very significant and applicable, there have been no formal justifications for the use of Monte‐Carlo models and Markov chains in evaluating hospital admission decisions or concrete data supporting their use. For these reasons, this research was designed to provide a deeper...

Watchfully waiting involves monitoring a patient's health state over time and deciding whether to undertake a medical intervention, or to postpone it and continue observing the patient. In this paper, we consider the timing of medical intervention as an optimal stopping problem. The development...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of medical information systems (IS) to efficient use of information when diagnosing chest pain complaints with suspected acute myocardial infarction (AMI) as regards ordering of tests and accuracy of diagnosis....

We develop a finite-horizon discrete-time constrained Markov decision process (MDP) to model diagnostic decisions after mammography where we maximize the total expected quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) of a patient under resource constraints. We use clinical data to estimate the parameters of...

Background. The introduction of a new generation of atypical antipsychotic agents has raised difficult economic and ethical questions, particularly in lower-income countries. The reported tolerability and efficacy advantages of the atypical antipsychotics over their conventional predecessors...