Analysis of Scheduling Models Applicable in Referral Health Systems
Abstract
Scheduling patient referrals is one of the most important administrative responsibilities performed in the medical office. A referral scheduling algorithm can be a useful tool in the hands of a primary provider. Primary providers are lacking knowledge regarding the care and treatment of chronic diseases and are not familiar with the current status of available resources (consultant doctors) for patient referrals. During patient referral there is a need to know of the availability of the consultant doctor and his/her status in terms of the patient workload. Referring a patient to a doctor with many patients on the waiting queue might delay the treatment. This can results in “added healing time, pain, and even death. This paper investigates the scheduling models applicable in referral health systems and hence proposes a suitable scheduling optimization model.
Keywords
Download Options
Introduction
The main objective of scheduling is an efficient allocation of shared resources over time to competing activities. Emphasis has been on investigating machine scheduling problems where jobs represent activities and machines represent resources. The problem is not only NP-hard, but also has a well-earned reputation of being one of the most computationally difficult combinatorial optimization problems considered to date. This intractability is one of the reasons why the problem has been so widely studied.
The problem of scheduling is concerned with searching for optimal (or near-optimal) schedules subject to a number of constraints. A variety of approaches have been developed to solve the problem of scheduling
Scheduling patient referrals is one of the most important administrative responsibilities performed in the medical office. A referral scheduling algorithm can be a useful tool in the hands of a primary provider.
Primary providers are lacking knowledge regarding the care and treatment of chronic diseases and are not familiar with the current status of available resources (consultant doctors) for patient referrals. During patient referral there is a need to know of the availability of the consultant doctor and his/her status in terms of the patient workload. Referring a patient to a doctor with many patients on the waiting queue might delay the treatment. This can results in “added healing time, pain, and even death (Arntson, 2011).
According to a Baseline Study on the Functionality of the Health Referral System conducted between June and July 2013 in eight counties: Garissa, Kakamega, Kilifi, Kirinyaga, Machakos, Nairobi, Nakuru, and Siaya, indicates that the health referral system in Kenya is less than optimal by 60% and the system needs immediate strengthening. (MoH – Kenya, 2014).
Conclusion
The research proposes a dynamic scheduling optimization model for patient referral system. The model should take into account the influencing factors in the access model.