Nurse scheduling: from academia to implementation or not?

The scheduling of nursing staff is a long-standing problem with myriads of research models published by academia. The exploratory research that we discuss examines the models that academia has produced and the models that hospitals have actually used. We use data from many sources, including research articles, e-mail and telephone surveys, an industry database, and a software source catalog. Only 30 percent of systems that research articles discuss are implemented, and there is very little academic involvement in systems that third-party vendors offer. We examine causes for the research–application gap and discuss directions for future academic research to make it more applicable.