An intelligent medical replenishment system for managing the medical resources in the healthcare industry

Abstract

Due to rapidly ageing population, the need for care and attention homes for the elderly and patient with chronic illnesses has increased significantly in recent years. However, the continuous increase in operation and medical costs and the problem of drugs shortages bring increasing pressure to care and attention homes in regard to medical resource allocation. In such situations, patients may not receive appropriate treatment and hence dissatisfaction with the quality of service may result. Therefore, it is essential to have a decision support system to ensure that an optimal amount of medical resources are stored so as to maintain a sustainable healthcare service. In this paper, an intelligent medical replenishment system (IMRS) is proposed to assist healthcare workers in arranging the appropriate type and quantity of drugs, based on the needs of patients. In IMRS, artificial intelligent techniques, i.e. fuzzy association rules mining and fuzzy logic, are applied to evaluate the historical diagnosis records of patients and determine the amount and frequency of medical resources for replenishment. To validate the feasibility of the proposed system, a pilot study is conducted in a care and attention home located in Hong Kong. The result shows that the IMRS is effective in improving the healthcare service quality for the elderly in terms of the elderly satisfaction and medical resources fulfillment.