ระบบวางแผนตารางอาหารสำหรับผู้ป่วยของโรงพยาบาลด้วยเทคนิคคอนสเตรนท์โปรแกรมมิ่ง

Abstract

Nutrition unit is one of the important operational units in hospital. The main responsibility of the unit is to produce and service meal for the admitted patients i.e. in-patient. The complication of the activities are the requirements to plan a dietary schedule that satisfying several constraints such as the prepared meals have to agree with doctors’ prescriptions, nutritional requirements, therapy, food sanitation, and are safe from any additives and unrefined things. A field study is shown that, a typical operation of this activity - even in the large hospital in Thailand, is conducted manually by dietitians or nutritionists with a minimum use of Information Technologies. This can affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the operation. For example, the correctness and the quality of the generated schedule is depend on an individual skills of nutritionists which can resulting taking longer times to generate a schedule and/or delivering inaccurate results. In addition, the human-based menu can lack of varieties resulting a lack of appetizing to patients. This research is aimed at improving efficiency issues of the manual-based dietary planning for hospital. A software-based dietary planning system is developed by concerning clinical dietary guideline using Constraint Programming technique. The system also enables users to manage dietary information through the database. Furthermore, out-patients can also use this system at their premises. To control the process of the software development, the implementation processes of this study is to follow the ISO 29110 standard. The evaluation has shown that the proposed system can generate the schedules that comply with dietary principle. It also introduces the new sophisticated features to enhance the effectiveness current operation i.e. user preference/ consuming-limitation are taken into account, and schedule can be generated in advance in 5 second. Moreover, users satisfaction evaluation is indicated that the user is relatively satisfied the proposed system which showing a possibility to use in real-life operation.