Use of Machine Learning for Long Term Planning and Cost Minimization in Healthcare Management

The Healthcare system of a country is a crucial infrastructure that requires long-term capacity planning. The covid 19 outbreak pointed to the necessity of adequate hospital capacity, especially for developing countries like Bangladesh. The existing infrastructure planning of these countries emphasizes short-term goals and lacks vision planning for a long time horizon. It is in the countrys best interest to make long-term capacity expansion plans, a strategy the developed countries banked to provide adequate healthcare facilities to their residents. However, no single solution is appropriate for a different region. Hence, it is required to comprehensively study the situation and constraints of the specific region before providing expensive capacity expansion plans. This work focuses on applying a deep Reinforcement Learning based long-term hospital bed capacity expansion plan. We utilize the RNN-LSTM based population forecast, deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) based policy-making, and state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence techniques to provide a solution. We perform a case study for the Abhaynagar Upazila of Jessore, one of the largest cities in the southwest part of Bangladesh, to analyze the benefits of such an approach compared to existing myopic policies. The experiment results show that the deep RL-based policy significantly minimizes cost over a 30-year expansion plan.