An App Developed for Predicting Nurse Intention to Quit the Job (NIQJ) Using the Artificial Neural Networks(ANN) in Microsoft Excel: Population-Based Questionnaire Study

Abstract

\n Background: Studies in the past have identified factors related to the nursing staff’s intention to leave the unit, institution, and profession. However, none has successfully predicted the nurse s intention to quit the job (NIQJ). Whether NIQJ can be predicted be predicted is an interesting topic in healthcare management. A model to predict the NIQJ for novice nurses in hospitals should be investigated and developed in this mobile computer age. Objective: The aim of this study is to build a model to develop an app for automatic prediction and classification of NIQJ using a smaller number of items to help assess NIQJ and take necessary actions before nurses quit the job.Methods: We recruited 1104 novice nurses working in six medical centers in Taiwan to complete 100-item questionnaires related to NIQJ in October 2018. The k-mean was used to divide nurses into two classes (i.e., NIQJ and Non- NIQJ) based on five- NIQJ items regarding leave intention. Feature variables were chosen from 100 relevant items. Two models, including artificial neural network (ANN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), were compared across four scenarios made up by two training sets (n=1104 and n=804B) and their corresponding testing (n=300a) sets to verify the model accuracy (e.g., sensitivity, specificity, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, AUC) and stability and generalization (e.g., using the training set to predict the testing set). An app predicting NIQJ was then developed involving the model s estimated parameters as a website assessment.Results: We observed that (1) 24 feature variables extracted from this study in ANN model yielded a higher AUC of 0.82 (95% CI 0.80-0.84) based on the total 1104 cases, (2) the ANN performed better than CNN on both accuracy, stability and generalization, and (3) an ready and available app for predicting NIQJ was successfully developed in this study.Conclusions: The 24-item ANN model with the 53 parameters estimated by the ANN for improving the accuracy of NIQJ has been developed with the use of Excel (Microsoft Corp). The app would help team leader and HR department to pick up nurse’s NIQJ before actions are taken, allowing them to make plans accordingly.