Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Agrawal, Dr. Rajeev

Abstract

With the advent of smart phone technologies, the healthcare industry finds it challenging to keep up with technology demands. In the medical domain, patients are experiencing longer wait times for medical treatment. A basis of dissatisfaction with healthcare, often observed by patients, is the amount of time they wait during a visit. The wait times have a greater delay within medical emergency facilities. Current medical wait time applications may encourage patients to be seen quickly but does not necessarily offer quality care or other aspects of their visits. The amount of time a patient experiences in an emergency facility could influence the patient's perspective and could be contingent upon other qualities. We sought to investigate the association between patient perception of the hospital, time to reach the hospital, patient wait time, patient reviews, and average service time of various North Carolina hospitals using product moment correlation analysis. Analyses were performed of the various hospitals based upon each parameter. In this thesis, we propose a smart phone based service to optimize travel time to a medical facility utilizing patient wait time, service time, time to reach the hospital, patient reviews, and patient perception of the facility and Global Positioning System (GPS) data. Various hospitals were compared ranking in according to the parameters individually, relative to other hospitals in neighboring counties and cities. Each constraint is assigned a weight to be used in the overall ranking of the hospital. We have established relationships about correlation parameters. The parameters were assessed to determine correlations between any two given parameters.

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