Acuity-based nurse assignment and patient scheduling in oncology clinics

Abstract

The oncology clinics use different nursing care delivery models to provide chemotherapy treatment to cancer patients. Functional and primary care delivery models are the most commonly used methods in the clinics. In functional care delivery model, patients are scheduled for a chemotherapy appointment without considering availabilities of individual nurses, and nurses are assigned to patients according to patient acuities, nursing skill, and patient mix on a given day after the appointment schedule is determined. Patients might be treated by different nurses on different days of their treatment. In primary care delivery model, each patient is assigned to a primary nurse, and the patients are scheduled to be seen by the same nurse every time they come to the clinic for treatment. However, these clinics might experience high variability in daily nurse workload due to treatment protocols that should be followed strictly. In that case, part-time nurses can be utilized to share the excess workload of the primary nurses. The aim of this study is to develop optimization methods to reduce the time spent for nurse assignment and patient scheduling in oncology clinics that use different nursing care delivery models. For the functional delivery model, a multiobjective optimization model with the objectives of minimizing patient waiting times and nurse overtime is proposed to solve the nurse assignment problem. For the primary care delivery model, another multiobjective optimization model with the objectives of minimizing total overtime and total excess workload is proposed to solve the patient scheduling problem. Spreadsheet-based optimization tools are developed for easy implementation. Computational results show that the proposed models provide multiple nondominated solutions, which can be used to determine the optimal staffing levels.