Modern Internet connectivity provides the ability to perform efficient communications between the control centre of a healthcare system and the internal management processes of the emergency departments in clinics. Based on this, resource management is improved when exploiting the available efficient connectivity for adapting to the operating state of the system. An efficient order of patient treatment tasks inside the emergency department can reduce in real-time the average treatment time per patient. The motivation to use adaptive methods and specifically evolutionary metaheuristics for this time-sensitive task, is the exploitation of the runtime conditions which may vary according to the patient incoming flow and the severity of each specific case. In this work, an evolutionary method improves the efficiency in the emergency department, according to the dynamically structured treatment task order. Specifically, the average time inside the ED is reduced at a small expense of the execution time. This renders similar methods as candidates for resource-allocating tasks.
Keywords: Ant Colony Optimization; Emergency departments; Evolutionary methods; Resource allocation; Swarm intelligence.