Continuity of Care in Integrated Patient and Nurse Planning
L. de Hoop (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
J.T. van Essen – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
F.J.J. de Meijer – Mentor (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
W.T. van Horssen – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
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Abstract
The patient-and-nurse-to-room assignment (PNRA) problem is an optimization problem related to hospital wards. This is an integrated problem in which patients and nurses are assigned to rooms in a way that minimizes various objectives. One of these objectives is the continuity of care objective. This objective aims to improve the relationship between a patient and their caregivers by minimizing the number of different nurses a patient has.
Because the PNRA problem is difficult to solve using ILPs, various heuristics are developed that focus on the continuity of care. These are the greedy heuristics, which greedily find a patient-to-room assignment, the interval heuristic, which solves the problem in several intervals, and simulated annealing.
A dataset of 70 instances was used to tune and evaluate the heuristics. These were separated into different sizes based on the number of patients. It was concluded that the performance of the heuristics depends on the instance size. For small instances, the best solutions were found using the interval heuristic and simulated annealing. For larger instances, the greedy non-sequential heuristic found the best solutions.