Stochastic Control for Organ Donations: A Review
This is an incremental review that synthesizes existing research for healthcare decision-makers and researchers in organ donation systems.
The paper reviews literature on organ acceptance decision-making by modeling it as a stochastic control problem using Markov Decision Processes, focusing on control limit-type policies that are optimal under certain conditions and practical to implement.
We review the literature on individual patient organ acceptance decision making by presenting a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to formulate the organ acceptance decision process as a stochastic control problem. Under the umbrella of the MDP framework, we classify and summarize the major research streams and contributions. In particular, we focus on control limit-type policies, which are shown to be optimal under certain conditions and easy to implement in practice. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and directions for future research.