NSP and Its Application Towards Increasing Patient Satisfaction in Assisted Living

摘要

The domain of nurse scheduling is a well-researched one. Researchers have been focusing mainly to increase the efficiency of nurses' allocation while maintaining the nurse satisfaction at an acceptable level. However, most of the existing works focus on optimizing the utilization of nursing staff. In the age of IoT, as more and more researches are carried on in the domain of assisted living, it becomes more important to use NSP for maximizing patient recovery. In our bid to understand the challenging issues of adapting the convention solutions in the assisted living scenario, a thorough state-of-the-art study has been done. This study led us to note the following issues that need to be addressed: 1. Nurse scheduling solutions mainly aim at assigning the nurses so as to maximize the utilization of available nurses. The solutions mostly lacked consideration for the perspective of patients, viz, their preferences and types of ailments. 2. Matching nurses' expertise to patients' requirements, as well as patients' preferences with respect to nurse availability is an issue that needs to be better investigated. 3. The problem of increased size of search space regarding increasing number of patients' requirements need to be focused in more specific way. The problem is defined as the assignment of a set of available nurses N to a set of patients P, depending on a number of criteria. The identification of parameters and the definition of constraints (soft and hard) is to be considered in such a way so as to maximize patient satisfaction. The cost function also needs to be formulated in terms of these parameters and the goal is to keep the cost at an optimum level. In this talk, the focus will be on discussing some of the relevant techniques used for solving the nurse scheduling problem, including a novel solution specifically aimed to increase patient satisfaction.