Tribune News Network
Doha
In a significant revolution for the healthcare sector, Prof Ridha Hamila, professor of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering at Qatar University (QU), has introduced an innovative system for remote patient routing to medical facilities.
This groundbreaking development promises to streamline patient scheduling and reduce the inefficiencies that currently plague healthcare systems worldwide.
Traditional patient scheduling methods, whether independent across hospitals or dependent on patients’ choices, often result in human interactions that cause delays and suboptimal outcomes. The current systems frequently lead to long queues, extended waiting times and increased risks for patients.The need for a more efficient, automated solution has become evident, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which placed unprecedented pressure on healthcare systems globally.
Professor Hamila’s system introduces a unified framework designed to distribute patients across various medical facilities efficiently. This system employs advanced algorithms to minimise the total expected service time and the probability of service delays.
The system features a processor in communication with a memory that receives scheduling requests from patients’ devices over a network. It gathers real-time information from multiple medical facilities, including current patient loads, occupancy states and availability. Using this data, the system determines the estimated service time for each patient, including travel, waiting and consultation times. It then selects the optimal medical facility to minimise delays and ensure timely treatment.
Comparative studies have shown that this system can improve performance by up to 50 percent over existing methods and algorithms.
The new Remote Patient Routing System developed by Prof Hamila addresses these challenges by providing a robust framework for the efficient distribution of patients across heterogeneous medical facilities. The system is designed to optimise the entire scheduling process, from receiving patient requests to assigning them to the appropriate medical facility based on various factors.
The system’s architecture includes several innovative features designed to streamline patient scheduling and distribution. The Control Unit maintains the state of medical facilities, including patient count, occupancy and availability. These states are regularly updated based on assignment decisions to ensure accurate scheduling. Patients are assigned to facilities based on their needs and the capabilities of each facility.
The system uses a window-based method to estimate the arrival rates of requests and service rates. Travel time from the patient’s location to the medical facility is calculated using an Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) model. Efficient communication between different system components ensures accurate data flow.
The system prioritises patients with severe or critical conditions, ensuring they receive timely care while managing other patients who can tolerate more delay. By formulating an optimisation problem as a convex combination of expected service time and service time tail probability metrics, the system employs an efficient iterative algorithm to minimide these factors, demonstrating performance improvements of up to 50 percent compared to existing algorithms.
With the introduction of this Remote Patient Routing System, QU is set to revolutionise the way medical facilities manage patient scheduling and distribution.The system not only improves efficiency but also ensures that patients receive timely and appropriate care, ultimately enhancing healthcare outcomes.
