Central to any medical domain is the challenging patient to medical professional assignment task, aimed at getting the right patient to the right medical professional at the right time. This task is highly complex and involves partially conflicting objectives such as minimizing patient wait-time while providing maximal level of care. To tackle this challenge, medical institutions apply common scheduling heuristics to guide their decisions. These generic heuristics often do not align with the expectations of each specific medical institution. In this article, we propose a novel learning-based online optimization approach we term Learning-Based Assignment (LBA), which provides decision makers with a tailored, data-centered decision support algorithm that facilitates dynamic, institution-specific multi-variate decisions, without altering existing medical workflows. We adapt our generic approach to two medical settings: (1) the assignment of patients to caregivers in an emergency department; and (2) the assignment of medical scans to radiologists. In an extensive empirical evaluation, using real-world data and medical experts’ input from two distinctive medical domains, we show that our proposed approach provides a dynamic, robust and configurable data-driven solution which can significantly improve upon existing medical practices.

Noise in the classroom has been found to have a negative impact on students. However, what can be done to lessen the impact of noise on student performance? How do students perceive noise in the classroom? How do students feel noise impacts on their ability to pay attention and learn in a classroom environment? My previous action project suggested that noise has a negative impact on student performance (Lapp, 2018). This action project was geared to determine whether cost effective baffolds found in Cawthra Park Secondary School’s library could lessen the noise levels. It was also geared to understand how students perceived noise and its effects in a classroom environment. The results suggested that the use of baffolds had a positive impact on lessening noise. It was also noteworthy that students tended to underestimate the noise levels in their classrooms. However, those that perceived the noise as being louder were more aware of its negative impacts than those who perceived the noise as being quieter.