Health care institutions face significant challenges. Hospitals are highly complex organizations where patients must be given high quality treatment at the right time - and where the use of critical resources must be coordinated in the best possible way. Today, treatment activities along the clinical pathways are scheduled in a fragmented and sub optimal manner. We believe this is partly because of the lack of efficient planning tools. This fragmented planning leads to many problems in the daily treatment because resource problems are detected too late or necessary preparatory activities have not been done in time. The result is frequent re-scheduling, cancelations and delays. This causes unnecessary stress for patients and personnel, a poor utilization of costly resources, and long patient queues.
The AKTIV project aims to amend this situation. We will achieve this by developing a new, advanced decision support tools for integrated activity planning. This tool will enable new and more unified planning processes. The idea is that planners in the various units at all times have access to an updated, comprehensive, workable and optimized plan that covers all important patient activities and resources in the business. The planning tool will have functionality for automatic construction and on-line revision of plans, and will support a close interaction with the human planner.
The new planning tool and the new planning process represent a significant innovation, nationally and internationally. The research is a continuation from the research project HOSPITAL (2007-2012, RCN project number 182 610), in which DIPS and SINTEF were both partners. In AKTIV, DIPS is the project owner while SINTEF ICT is the research partner and has the project management. The project consortium also includes the hospital organisations University hospital of North Norway and Vestre Viken HF, who will contribute with indispensable domain knowledge, problem descriptions and result evaluation.