Decision support system for rehabilitation scheduling to enhance the service quality and the effectiveness of hospital resource management

In hospitals, rehabilitation inpatients often complain about long waiting time between the therapeutic processes. Due to the partial precedence constraints of rehabilitation therapies, the rehabilitation scheduling problem is a hybrid shop scheduling problem. This article aims to construct a decision support system for rehabilitation scheduling. Equipped with the developed genetic algorithm, this system can generate the optimal schedules for rehabilitation patients to minimize waiting time and thus enhance service quality and overall resource effectiveness of rehabilitation facilities. The developed system is also equipped with GUI (graphical user interfaces) to provide scheduling information including Gantt charts and scheduling lists to support various users including therapists and inpatients. We conducted an empirical study in a general hospital for validation. The results showed that the waiting time of each inpatient is reduced significantly and thus demonstrated the practical viability of the proposed solution to enhance the effectiveness of hospital resource management. The developed system has been implemented online in the hospital.