Building Cyclic Schedules for Emergency Department Physicians

Authors:
Yann Ferrand;Michael Magazine;Uday S. Rao;Todd F. Glass
Affiliations:
Department of Operations and Business Analytics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221;Department of Operations and Business Analytics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221;Department of Operations and Business Analytics, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio 45221;Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Liberty Campus, Cincinnati, Ohio 45229
Venue:
Interfaces
Year:
2011

Citing 4
Cited 3

Scheduling medical residents to rotations: solving the large-scale multiperiod staff assignment problem

Operations Research
Medical resident work schedules: design and evaluation by simulation modeling

Management Science
Scheduling Medical Residents at Boston University School of Medicine

Interfaces
Physician scheduling in emergency rooms

PATAT'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Practice and theory of automated timetabling VI

Commentaries to “The Vital Role of Operations Analysis in Improving Healthcare Delivery”

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
A goal programming model for scheduling residents in an anesthesia and reanimation department

Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
A hierarchical goal programming model for scheduling the outpatient clinics

Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Physicians at a branch of the emergency department at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center complained that their schedules were too erratic because of the multitude of operating requirements, regulatory constraints, physician preferences, and holiday requests. We addressed this issue by using integer programming to build cyclic schedules that can be repeated throughout the year. These schedules are flexible enough to handle incorporating holidays, work assignments, and vacation requests ex post. After we rolled out the calendar-year-based cyclic schedule, we captured statistics to assess the viability and the quality of the yearly schedule generated. Surveys of the physicians and the scheduler after implementation showed that the new schedule provides predictability and well-balanced work patterns.