Improving Patient Activity Schedules by Multi-agent Pareto Appointment Exchanging

Abstract

C e n t r u m v o o r W i s k u n d e e n I n f o r m a t i c aSoftware ENgineering

Patient Journey Optimization Using a Multi-Agent Approach

“…Then, a time-slot swapping process is enforced for further enhancement in patient journey quality (rescheduling phase). Here we assume that two patient agents with their treatment plans containing operations of the same type but scheduled at different time are willing to be matched by resource agents and to exchange the corresponding timeslots as far as none of their schedules is worsen (as suggested in [7]) and none of the temporal constraints as specified in (2) Initial assignment based on P i 's treatment plan 3: for each P i 's treatment operation do 4: Rescheduled to be performed earlier by exchanging timeslot with another patient agent with the help of the resource agent (rescheduling phase) 5: if No involving parties are worsened in terms of their resulting overall schedules then…”

“…We adopt a two-phases scheduling algorithm similar to what being proposed in [5,7]. For each newly admitted patient, a treatment plan is first designed and then the corresponding treatment operations are initially scheduled with the temporal constraints of the operations and the unit capacity taken into account (initial assignment phase).…”

“…Multi-agent methods have found applications in a variety of problem domains, such as airport resource scheduling [3], load allocation in transportation logistics [6], supply chain management [10], etc. Recently, it has also been applied to patient scheduling in [5,7] with some initial success demonstrated. And yet, there are limitations.…”

“…Paulussen et al,in [5], assume that a quantified health state can be accurately derived as a utility measure for guiding the scheduling process. In [7], Vermeulen et al did not consider the temporal constraints between the treatment operations during the scheduling process.…”

“…Also, it is one of the vital key performance indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of healthcare service providers. In order to best utilize the existing resources to raise healthcare service level, careful application of scheduling algorithms is crucial [7]. While conventional operations research methods have been found effective for scheduling related problems found in different medical units [8,9,4], most of them take the centralized approach and are not designed to be applied to decentralized situations where multiple resources at multiple hospitals are to be coordinated [5,7,2].…”