Scheduling Medical Residents at Boston University School of Medicine

Amy Cohn (), Sarah Root (), Carisa Kymissis (), Justin Esses () and Niesha Westmoreland ()
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Amy Cohn: Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109
Sarah Root: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas 72703
Carisa Kymissis: Department of Psychiatry, St. Luke's Hospital, New York, New York 10025
Justin Esses: Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts 02118
Niesha Westmoreland: Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York 10467

Interfaces, 2009, vol. 39, issue 3, 186-195

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: philosophy of modeling; health care; hospitals; integer programming applications; multiple criteria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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