Decision support for rehabilitation hospital scheduling

Abstract

We present a detailed analysis of the patient and resource scheduling problem in rehabilitation hospitals. In practice, the predominantly therapeutical treatments and activities which are prescribed for the patients are typically scheduled manually.This leads to rigid and inefficient schedules which can have negative effects on the quality of care and the patients' satisfaction. We outline the conceptual framework of a decision support system for the scheduling process that is based on formal optimization models. To this end, we first develop a large-scale monolithic optimization model. Then we derive a numerically tractable hierarchical model system in order to deal with problem instances of realistic sizes. We report numerical results with respect to solution times, model sizes and solution quality.

Task scheduling in long-term care facilities: A client-centered approach

“…This paper, on the contrary, assumes a given workforce composition and variable start times for tasks. Schimmelpfeng et al (2012) present a task scheduling approach for rehabilitation hospitals with different qualifications and precedence constraints between tasks, but they do not consider time preferences for individual tasks. A general difference between a hospital and a nursing home is that patients usually visit hospitals only for a short period of time, therefore hospitals can focus on high resource utilization rather than on meeting time preferences.…”

Organizing integrated processes in cancer care

“…Multiple studies schedule rehabilitation appointments on an inpatient and/or outpatient basis [68,69,254,273]. Often, a multi-stage model is used to reduce the problem complexity.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…The goal is to provide treatments at the right time and in the right sequence, while resource utilization is maximized. The quality of the schedules is highly important for the medical effectiveness and the eco-nomic efficiency of rehabilitation centers [430]. Since the amount of variables is tremendous, treatment scheduling for a complete rehabilitation center is highly complex.…”

“…Treatment scheduling [430] Recall that since the literature on residential care services showed a low variety in addressed planning decisions, we have chosen for residential care services, as opposed to the other care services, to only present planning decisions for which we found references (see Section 3.9).…”

“…Since the amount of variables is tremendous, treatment scheduling for a complete rehabilitation center is highly complex. In [430], it is claimed that if scheduling is done by hand, it is generally done on a patient-by-patient or even appointment-for-appointment basis. Therefore, decision support tools based on OR/MS are considered as indispensable to achieve high-quality treatment scheduling.…”