Scheduling travelling inspectors
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Scheduling travelling inspectors - a modular decision support system helps to plan laboratory accreditation visits
Veena Adlakha and Hossein Arsham This article describes the development of a decision support system to help a US organisation, the Commission on Office Laboratory Accreditation, to plan laboratory accreditation visits.
The formation of clusters and many other decision
-oo0oo-
creating a major problem for COLA. Moreover, COLA did not have any track of the surveyor's schedule and/or routeing. Since the distribution of
rules were subjective. The clustering approach created 'outlier' labs with a high cost of survey because of sparsity in their location distribution.
Some of these labs' accreditation date had expired,
The Commission on Office Laboratory Accreditation (COLA) is a voluntary accreditation and education
program for physician office laboratories. It was
labs is dynamic and changes over time, the problem of planning visits had become unmanageable.
Physicians (AAFP), the American Society of Internal Medicine (ASIM), the American Medical Association
Examining the problem
founded by the American Academy of Family (AMA), and the College of American Pathologists (CAP). COL A's mission is to educate and accredit
The purpose of the project was to construct an inter-
office laboratories (labs) throughout the United States. The federal government passed a law that requires physicians who operate labs to be either
active prototype decision support system (DSS) to determine the critical factors before introducing an operational DSS to replace the existing practice of manual allocation of labs to surveyors. The prototype DSS had to be able to produce the labs' timetable, the surveyors' rosters, and an estimate for the
certified by the Health Care Financing Administra-
tion (HCFA) or COLA. lt has been a continuous challenge for COLA to prepare an efficient and economical laboratory inspection schedule for the
total cost including, car rental, hotels, and other daily expenses (over $300 per lab on the average at the time, without overheads).
surveyors while maintaining quality.
The principle problem encountered by COLA was achieving a satisfactory compromise between the
At the time of the study, COLA was experiencing a
period of rapid growth which was expected to
surveyor's travel cost and the quality of service.
continue in the future. Therefore, the new system had to allow for future expansion (je more labs and surveyors). It was anticipated that an interactive
COLA's goal was to obtain consistency and reliability in meeting survey date schedules while minimizing survey costs.
user interface would aid in the effective deployment of surveyors. The objective was to provide an effec-
Prior to the development of the DSS, survey visits were planned manually. First, the location of labs to
tive model for implementation while preserving a high degree of realism in order to capture characteristics of COLA's decision environment. Other requirements included editing functions and mini-
be
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