Equity distribution of quality evaluation reports to doctors in health care organizations

Abstract

There are volumes of patient reports generated in any healthcare organization daily. The reports can be very lengthy or of few pages. Maintaining records of patients is essential for ensuring quality medical care. Doctors, apart from their routine activities, are also responsible to sort, examine and archive the generated reports. However, this process consumes doctors’ time, who are already hard-pressed for time. The objective of this study is to search for a method that can assign reports to doctors to ensure equitable and fair distribution of the overall workload. As a part of the solution, a mathematical model will be proposed to perform different developed heuristics. An experimental evaluation using different classes with a total of 2,450 different instances will be tested to measure the performance of the developed heuristics in terms of, elapsed time and gap value calculations. The clustering heuristics which is based on two groups is the best heuristic with 96.1% for the small instances and 98% for the big scale instances. The contribution of this work is based on employing dispatching rules with several variants; randomization approach, clustering methods; probabilistic method, and iterative methods approach to assign all given reports to doctors while ensuring the equitable distribution of the paper workload.