TY - JOUR
T1 - Nurse-patient assignment models considering patient acuity metrics and nurses' perceived workload
AU - Sir, Mustafa Y.
AU - Dundar, Bayram
AU - Barker Steege, Linsey M.
AU - Pasupathy, Kalyan S.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Inc.
PY - 2015/6/1
Y1 - 2015/6/1
N2 - Patient classification systems (PCSs) are commonly used in nursing units to assess how many nursing care hours are needed to care for patients. These systems then provide staffing and nurse-patient assignment recommendations for a given patient census based on these acuity scores. Our hypothesis is that such systems do not accurately capture workload and we conduct an experiment to test this hypothesis. Specifically, we conducted a survey study to capture nurses' perception of workload in an inpatient unit. Forty five nurses from oncology and surgery units completed the survey and rated the impact of patient acuity indicators on their perceived workload using a six-point Likert scale. These ratings were used to calculate a workload score for an individual nurse given a set of patient acuity indicators. The approach offers optimization models (prescriptive analytics), which use patient acuity indicators from a commercial PCS as well as a survey-based nurse workload score. The models assign patients to nurses in a balanced manner by distributing acuity scores from the PCS and survey-based perceived workload. Numerical results suggest that the proposed nurse-patient assignment models achieve a balanced assignment and lower overall survey-based perceived workload compared to the assignment based solely on acuity scores from the PCS. This results in an improvement of perceived workload that is upwards of five percent.
AB - Patient classification systems (PCSs) are commonly used in nursing units to assess how many nursing care hours are needed to care for patients. These systems then provide staffing and nurse-patient assignment recommendations for a given patient census based on these acuity scores. Our hypothesis is that such systems do not accurately capture workload and we conduct an experiment to test this hypothesis. Specifically, we conducted a survey study to capture nurses' perception of workload in an inpatient unit. Forty five nurses from oncology and surgery units completed the survey and rated the impact of patient acuity indicators on their perceived workload using a six-point Likert scale. These ratings were used to calculate a workload score for an individual nurse given a set of patient acuity indicators. The approach offers optimization models (prescriptive analytics), which use patient acuity indicators from a commercial PCS as well as a survey-based nurse workload score. The models assign patients to nurses in a balanced manner by distributing acuity scores from the PCS and survey-based perceived workload. Numerical results suggest that the proposed nurse-patient assignment models achieve a balanced assignment and lower overall survey-based perceived workload compared to the assignment based solely on acuity scores from the PCS. This results in an improvement of perceived workload that is upwards of five percent.
KW - Nurse-patient assignment
KW - Patient acuity indicators
KW - Workload
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.04.005
DO - 10.1016/j.jbi.2015.04.005
M3 - Article
C2 - 25912638
AN - SCOPUS:84930737003
SN - 1532-0464
VL - 55
SP - 237
EP - 248
JO - Journal of Biomedical Informatics
JF - Journal of Biomedical Informatics
ER -