A Real-time Approach for Dynamic Scheduling Pet Activities in a Hospital

<div data-language="eng" data-ev-field="abstract">Background: At present, medical personnel use manual scheduling methods to calculate usage times of PET devices, hospital beds, operating rooms, and other treatment spaces. However, as patient treatment and recovery times are unequal and uncertain, arriving times of the scheduled/temporary patients are unexpected, examination items, beds requirements, and drugs waiting times are different, and scan-again requirements are unexpected. Manual scheduling arrangements are easy to make mistakes and put pressure on employees. With changing scheduling arrangements, it is difficult to announce the estimated time to patients and their families in real time. As a result, family members keep asking medical staff about various situations and waiting time. This makes the process unstable and exhausts the medical staff. Although previous researches proposed algorithms for specific inspections to solve the equipment resource allocation problems and calculate outpatient visit time for outpatient clinics, there is no research on improving the PET process. This paper proposes a real-time automatic scheduling and control system for PET patients with Bluetooth Beacon positioning. Results: This system can automatically schedule, estimate, and instantly update the start and end time of various tasks of PET patients during examinations, and automatically allocate beds and real-time announce schedule information, allowing the schedule being automated, instant and almost optimized. Moreover, this system promptly reminds medical staffs in each area. This can greatly reduce the work of medical staff, avoid human error, improve the safety of drugs, and provide medical staff, patients and family members to view the inspection progress and estimated waiting time in real time, reducing the number of patients and family members to query medical staff. We implemented this system in an application for the Android system to prove the feasibility of the system. We also collected time data of 200 actual patients for 2 weeks in the Department of Nuclear Medicine of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Linkou, and put these data into the implementation program for simulation and comparison. It was found that the average time difference between manual and automatic scheduling was 7.32 minutes, and it could reduce the average examination time of 82% of patients by 6.14 minutes, proving the system's correctness and efficiency. To our knowledge, this paper is the first to propose a real-time automatic scheduling and control system for PET patients.<br/></div> &copy; 2020, CC BY.