应用人工智能和终端用户工具开发护士自动排班系统

Artificial intelligence and end user tools to develop a nurse duty roster scheduling system

目的医院病房每月均需编制护士排班表。病房管理者需要根据员工要求和医院政策进行排班和调整,花费时间较长。本研究旨在开发一个护士自动排班系统,使用开放式操作工具,兼顾医院要求和护士个人需求,快速生成排班表。方法应用人工智能和终端用户工具运筹学工具编写护士排班系统代码。与以往的排班系统算法相比,本研究开发的系统使用开放式架构,在某医院一个病房根据实际排班需求进行应用和评估。结果排班表在1分钟内生成,可满足所有硬性规定及大多数护士的软性需求。与传统手工排班相比,该排班系统具备护士和病房管理者之间的实时交互功能,并能进行排班表优化调整。系统生成的排班表可灵活应对病房工作人员日常排班变化,保障安全的人员配置水平。结论采用开源运筹学方法开发的护士自动排班系统经济、高效、用户友好,使用顺畅。该系统可在医院的不同病房使用,并可由受过培训的医院信息工作定期更新医院政策规定和护士人力配置以适应实际工作需要。

Objectives A nurse duty roster is usually prepared monthly in a hospital ward.It is common for nurses to make duty shift requests prior to scheduling.A ward manager normally spends more than a working day to manually prepare and subsequently to optimally adjust the schedule upon staff requests and hospital policies.This study aimed to develop an automatic nurse roster scheduling system with the use of open-source operational research tools by taking into account the hospital standards and the constraints from nurses.Methods Artificial intelligence and end user tools operational research tools were used to develop the code for the nurse duty roster scheduling system.To compare with previous research on various heuristics in employee scheduling,the current system was developed on open architecture and adopted with real shift duty requirements in a hospital ward.Results The schedule can be generated within 1 min under both hard and soft constraint optimization.All hard constraints are fulfilled and most nurse soft constraints could be met.Compared with those schedules prepared manually,the computer-generated schedules were more optimally adjusted as real time interaction among nurses and management personnel.The generated schedules were flexible to cope with daily and hourly duty changes by redeploying ward staff in order to maintain safe staffing levels.Conclusions An economical but yet highly efficient and user friendly solution to nurse roster scheduling system has been developed and adopted using open-source operational research methodology.The open-source platform is found to perform satisfactorily in scheduling application.The system can be implemented to different wards in hospitals and be regularly updated with new hospital polices and nurse manpower by hospital information personnel with training in artificial intelligence.