Optimization of Medical Staffing Costs in Hospital Emergency Departments

Health system managers should determine how to choose the medical staff configuration in each service within the constraints concerning the mean waiting time of all patients. Hospital managers wish to increase the utilization of available resources secured from their health services budget. Therefore, managers must construct highly efficient systems that can reduce staffing costs while providing the required level of care, such as maximizing patient satisfaction and minimizing waiting time. In this research, an algorithm embedding ordinal optimization into beluga whale optimization is developed to resolve the optimal medical staff configuration in emergency departments. Beluga whale optimization is a nature-inspired approach that depicts the behaviors of swimming, foraging, and whale falling of beluga whale populations. The developed algorithm is used to find the optimal medical staff configuration such that waiting times are minimized. Experimental results reveal that the developed algorithm has the capability of providing competitive and promising results.