Health Care Decision Support System for the Pediatric Emeregency Department Management.

ABSTRACT

Health organization management is facing a high amount of complexity due to the inherent dynamics of the processes and the distributed organization of hospitals. It is therefore necessary for health care institutions to focus on this issue in order to deal with patients' requirements and satisfy their needs. The main objective of this study is to develop and implement a Decision Support System which can help physicians to better manage their organization, to anticipate the overcrowding feature, and to establish avoidance proposals for it. This work is a part of HOST project (Hospital Optimization, Simulation, and Crowding Avoidance) of the French National Research Agency (ANR). It aims to optimize the functioning of the Pediatric Emergency Department characterized by stochastic arrivals of patients which leads to its overcrowding and services overload. Our study is a set of tools to smooth out patient flows, enhance care quality and minimize long waiting times and costs due to resources allocation. So we defined a decision aided tool based on Multi-agent Systems where actors negotiate and cooperate under some constraints in a dynamic environment. These entities which can be either physical agents representing real actors in the health care institution or software agents allowing the implementation of optimizing tools, cooperate to satisfy the demands of patients while respecting emergency degrees. This paper is concerned with agents' negotiation. It proposes a new approach for multi-skill tasks scheduling based on interactions between agents.