Scheduling Medical Residents at Boston University School of Medicine

The chief residents in the psychiatry program at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) must construct a schedule that simultaneously assigns residents to five types of call shifts, spanning three different hospitals, over a 365-day planning horizon. We show how user expertise and heuristic app...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Interfaces (Providence) 2009-05, Vol.39 (3), p.186-195
Main Authors: Cohn, Amy, Root, Sarah, Kymissis, Carisa, Esses, Justin, Westmoreland, Niesha
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Analysis
Bards
Business studies
Education
Health care
Heuristics
Hospital planning
Hospitals
Integer programming
integer programming applications
Laboratory schools
Management science
Mathematical programming
Medical residencies
Medical students
multiple criteria
Nurses
Operations research
philosophy of modeling
Physicians
Problem solving
Programming
Psychiatry
Schedules
Scheduling
Staffing
Studies
Teaching hospitals
Vacations
Workforce planning
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Summary:The chief residents in the psychiatry program at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) must construct a schedule that simultaneously assigns residents to five types of call shifts, spanning three different hospitals, over a 365-day planning horizon. We show how user expertise and heuristic approaches alone fail to find acceptable solutions to this complex combinatorial problem; likewise, mathematical programming techniques alone are inadequate, largely because they lack a clearly definable objective function. However, by combining both approaches, we were able to find high-quality solutions in a very short time. The resulting schedule, which BUSM uses currently, has yielded substantial benefits; the solution quality has improved, and the effort required to develop the solution has been reduced.
ISSN:0092-2102
2644-0865
1526-551X
2644-0873
DOI:10.1287/inte.1080.0369