Healthcare decision support tool: Multi-Agent system for bed management

Abstract

The effective management of the allocation of limited resources such as beds is a key to the delivery of timely, high quality and low cost healthcare. However, an efficient utilisation of beds is not easy to accomplish because of the complexity of the healthcare system and the higher amount of problems that the hospitals are facing such as the overcrowding. Moreover, in order to solve these problems, effective bed management remains one of the prominent solutions for the majority of hospitals. In this paper, a decision support system based on multi-Agent systems has been proposed. The suggested tool will assist healthcare practitioners to manage beds in the hospitals and also to address the problem of bed management by offering a referral depending on availability of beds to avoid tension in hospitals.