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

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.