Patent ID: 8027849

Claim:
A method to schedule a plurality of resources in delivery of healthcare to a plurality of patients, the method comprising the steps of: identifying an availability of one or more of the resources to deliver the healthcare to each of the plurality of patients; and through execution of instructions by at least one processor of at least one machine: calculating a predicted duration to deliver the healthcare to each of the patients; calculating a schedule including at least one block of time dependent on the predicted duration for at least one of the plurality of resources to deliver healthcare to one or more of the patients, the at least one block of time including a start time and an end time; calculating a confidence level in the schedule, the confidence level including at least one of a probability that the at least one resource will not be available for the at least one block of time of the schedule or a likelihood that the at least one resource will be available for the at least one block of time in the schedule; wherein the step of calculating the confidence includes creating a cumulative probability density function generated from historical data of availability of one or more of the plurality of resources in delivery of healthcare and accumulating the composite effects of durations of previous tasks in the schedule in a causal relationship captured in a constraints based relationship; and outputting the schedule and the confidence level in the schedule.