Participants:
Faculty/Clinicians/Staff: Luke Pesonen, Amy Cohn, William Pozehl
Students: Theodore Endreson, Anna Learis, Kevin Li, Steven Macpherson, Dale Mallete, Samantha Roth, Bassel Salka
Project Contact: [email protected]
Project Synopsis:
Surgical residents at St. Joseph Mercy Health System spend most of their days in the operating room. However, they also must round on patients and take call to cover emergency procedures. A chief resident is responsible for creating the monthly call and rounding schedule, which is not only time-consuming, but also prone to human error. These schedules can become extremely complex after factoring in educational requirements of residents, vacation time, and other such constraints.
The ORCA project (Optimizing Resident Call Assignments) focused on ensuring the nightly call teams comprise a senior, mid-level, and junior resident while also equitably distributing the calls across residents, providing adequate spacing between assignments, and avoiding conflicts with other duties. In collaboration with the chief resident, we created a linear programming formulation to generate high-quality schedules rapidly. This formulation was developed in such a way that changes could be implemented quickly, for example, if the chief resident wanted to ensure all junior residents took a minimum of four intern shifts instead of three, only one input file would need to be modified.
Although the project focused on one specific residency program at one medical system, this methodology is easily extendable to other residency programs and medical systems.
Papers, Posters, & Presentations:
Posters:
- “Optimizing Resident Call Assignments.” Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety Symposium, Ann Arbor MI, September 2017.
Presentations:
- “Optimizing Resident Call Assignments.” IISE Annual Conference, Orlando FL, May 2018.
- “Applying Optimization Techniques to Surgical Call Scheduling.” HSPI Annual Conference, Atlanta GA, February 2018.