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Pandemic surges can rapidly overwhelm hospital capacity, where shortages of beds and nurse fatigue contribute directly to increased excess mortality, making coordinated decision-making across emergency departments, intensive care units, and general wards essential yet difficult to achieve under centralized control systems. Centralized approaches to bed allocation and nurse staffing optimization are limited because each hospital unit holds critical local information—such as real-time patient acuity, staff availability, and infection control status—that cannot be easily shared due to privacy constraints and communication delays during crisis conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a federated multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that enables coordinated decision-making for bed distribution and nurse staffing across hospital units without requiring centralization of sensitive clinical or workforce data. The system consists of local reinforcement learning agents deployed in each unit that participate in federated aggregation, a coordination mechanism that aligns inter-unit policies, and a surge detection module that dynamically switches operational strategies during pandemic escalation periods. This distributed architecture maintains data privacy while supporting adaptive, system-wide coordination under surge conditions, overcoming the limitations of both centralized optimization models and rule-based heuristic approaches.

Atrial fibrillation affects over 30 million people worldwide and requires long-term anticoagulation, with warfarin still widely used due to its efficacy and reversibility, but its narrow therapeutic window (INR 2.0–3.0) makes dosing particularly challenging, especially in high bleeding-risk patients where both under- and over-anticoagulation can lead to serious complications. Conventional dosing approaches rely on population-based nomograms and clinician judgment, failing to capture individual variability driven by genetics, diet, comorbidities, and drug interactions. To address this limitation, this article proposes a conceptual framework that integrates deep reinforcement learning with a safety-shield mechanism for personalized warfarin dosing. The system uses a deep Q-network trained on historical patient trajectories within an offline Markov Decision Process to recommend dose adjustments based on INR history and clinical risk factors, while a deterministic rule-based safety layer blocks unsafe actions, such as dose increases when INR exceeds 3.5 or extreme adjustments requiring clinician review. Conservative offline reinforcement learning further reduces the risk of unsafe policy extrapolation by limiting overestimation of out-of-distribution actions. Together, this hybrid architecture aims to improve time in therapeutic range while minimizing bleeding risk, providing a structured and clinically constrained approach for safer, individualized anticoagulation management in high-risk atrial fibrillation patients.