Team Formation in Community-Based Palliative Care

Abstract

In this paper, a novel knowledge-based evolutionary algorithm is proposed to assemble a team of care providers for patients in community-oriented palliative care. The main objective of this research is to optimize the patient's care services and human resource allocation process. From a system perspective in palliative care, there exists a group of patients with needs who are not able to perform some of their ordinary life activities due to their limited capability, as a consequence of their disease or disorders. On the other hand, we have a group of care providers who are capable, skilled, and ready to provide a wide range of services to the patients to fulfill those needs. This poses the challenge of assigning members to a team of care providers in an optimal manner to help the patient satisfy their needs, while taking into consideration the communication, distance and contact costs. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel algorithm based on a cultural algorithm (CA) as the basis for our model for assembling an optimal team of care providers. The overall goals are to minimize the costs and increase the patient's satisfaction rate. We have evaluated our model using multiple synthetic networks and conducted comparative analysis with other existing methods. The results show that our proposed model can overcome the shortcomings posed by the existing approaches.