A Markov chain model to evaluate patient transitions in small community hospitals

A patient journey in the hospital may include many departments or units. Making safe and smooth transitions within the hospital is of significant importance. This paper introduces a Markov chain model to study patient transitions between emergency department, intensive or critical care unit, and hospital ward. An iteration method is presented to evaluate the performance of transition process. It is shown that such a method has a high accuracy of estimation and can be used to study patient transitions in small community hospitals.