| Sumario: | Matching nursing resources with patient needs and acuity while maintaining patient safety and quality of care has become increasingly difficult due to the increase in nursing shortage. Nurses have growing concerns about equity and satisfaction regarding patient assignments. The purpose of this project was to discover the effects of utilizing an acuity tool that interfaces with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) to accurately assess patient acuity and balance the nursepatient workload. A search plan was developed to identify keywords within several article databases. Existing literature identified evidence on how an electronic acuity-based staffing tool balances nurse-to-patient workload and allows for consistent, high-quality patient care while managing healthcare costs. An acuity measurement tool interfaced with the EHR can be an excellent resource for optimizing nurse staffing and workload. Electronically predicting a patient's acuity provides a powerful tool for healthcare managers to allocate resources. Such estimations and predictions on patient's acuity can be produced from vast amounts of electronic healthcare data, information technology, and computational intelligence techniques. Using tactical decision-making and resource allocation with different mathematical optimization models will support acuity predictions and help to balance nurse workloads.
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