Analytics and Lean Health Care to Address Nurse Care Management Challenges for Inpatients in Emerging Economies.

PURPOSE: Prescriptive and predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) provide tools to analyze data with objectivity. In this paper, we provide an overview of how these techniques can improve nursing care, and we detail a quantitative model to afford managerial insights about care management in a Hospital in Colombia. Our main purpose is to provide tools to improve key performance indicators for the care management of inpatients which includes the nurse workload. METHODS: The optimal nurse-to-patient assignment problem is addressed using analytics, lean health care, and AI. Also, we propose a new mathematical model to optimize the nurse-to-patient assignment decisions considering several variables about the patient state such as the Barthel index, their risks, the complexity of the care, and the mental state. FINDINGS: Our results show that there are several processes inherent to compassionate nursing care that can be improved using technology. By using data analytics, we can also provide insights about the high variability of the care requirements and, by using models, find nurse-to-patient assignments that are nearly perfectly balanced. CONCLUSIONS: We illustrated this improvement with a pilot test that makes the equitable distribution of nursing workload the functionality of this strategy. The findings can be useful in highly complex hospitals in Latin America. CLINICAL RELEVANCE: The proposed model presents an opportunity to make near perfectly balanced nurse-to-patient assignments according to the number of patients and their health conditions using technology.

Perception channels and cognitive styles: opponents, followers or learning allies?

This article presents the findings in the process of evaluating the relationship between perception channels and cognitive styles, from the analysis of conceptions over time and their involvement. Establishing through an experiment, and applying two didactic strategies, the associations with learning. Channels are characterized with VAK, Styles with CHAEA, and Performance with a pre-test/post-test design. It was shown that channels and styles are allies that independently encourage the teaching-learning process. Outcome shows that people with multiple channels and styles develop more skills, achieving better results. Games as ludic activities stimulate all channels, and favor the construction of knowledge, thus improving performance with positive differences in p-values between 0.014 and 0.022.