An information visualization approach to hospital shifts scheduling

Scheduling staff shift work in a hospital ward is a well-known problem in the operation research field but, as such, it is very often studied from the algorithmic point of view and seldom from the human-computer interaction perspective. In most cases, the automatic solutions that operations research may provide do not satisfy the involved people. After discussing the inconveniences of an automatic approach with physicians, we have designed a staff scheduling system that combines an expert system with an information visualization (IV) system; in this way the schedule generated by the expert system is presented through the IV system to the schedule manager, who can modify the results if last minute changes are necessary, by directly manipulating the visualized data and obtaining immediate feedback about the changes made.