Developing a multi-agent platform supporting patient hospital stays following a socio-technical approach: Management and governance benefits

Most of the caregivers working in hospitals are highly skilled and educated work force. Even if they are supported by administrative staff, part of their time still consists of administrative procedures or trying to empirically fill or retrieve agendas on the basis of real-time constraints. Similarly, patients waste time waiting for adequate treatments so they occupy slots (beds) in hospitals while their hospitalization is not a necessity. This leads to huge wastes of resources for the hospital that has to hospitalize and prioritize patients in more effective need of care and monitoring. In order to ensure real-time patient support during its entire stay in the hospital (in terms of bed occupancy, appointments with doctors and/or for medico-technical exams) as well as to furnish a central solution open for future IT integration we propose, in this paper, to build a Multi-Agent System (MAS) based software solution. The latter has been built following a socio-technical approach; it maps, at runtime, the working processes of a Belgian hospital. Processes have been modeled in a patient-centric way in order to identify most relevant stages and bottlenecks in bed, cares and medico-technical exams management; real-time data transmission allows to update and re-optimize slots statuses as well as schedules. Also, data analysis (i.e., business intelligence) functions are supported by the MAS implementation for decision making/taking. Further than the proof of concept that shows the managerial support of the software solution, the MAS modules' benefits to the overall hospital strategy is studied. The latter shows the relevance of the solution to the hospital's governance.