Participants:
Faculty/Clinicians/Staff: William Pozehl, Amy Cohn, and with thanks to the many chief residents we’ve worked with throughout this project
Students: Katherine Burns, Dean Golan, Laura Hattar, Matt Howard, Matthew Levenson, Simran Malik, Caroline Owens, Harini Pennathur, Bassel Salka, Kristine Wang
Project Contact: [email protected]
Project Synopsis:
Chief residents for the Pediatrics Residency Program are responsible for staffing the Emergency Room at Mott Children’s Hospital. However, creating the schedules by hand is incredibly time-consuming for the chief residents. In addition to following federal, state, and hospital regulations regarding permissible workloads, it becomes exceptionally difficult when trying to honor vacation requests, avoid bad sleep patterns, and ensure fair assignments for over 20 residents in each 4-week planning horizon. In order to solve this complex problem and ensure fair distributions of shifts for residents in the department, our team has developed a scheduling tool that can automate the scheduling process. Our tool has the capability to prioritize different objectives, such as minimizing bad sleep patterns or denied vacations, and it creates a complete, high-quality schedule for the chief resident to staff the Emergency Room at all times. Incorporating this scheduling tool has not only saves the chief residents significant time but also improves the schedules with regards to several important quality metrics.
Papers, Posters, & Presentations:
Posters:
- “Resident Scheduling for Pediatric Night Shifts Using OpenSolver.” HSPI Annual Conference, San Antonio TX, February 2019.
- “Night Team Scheduling for Pediatric Inpatient Residents.” INFORMS Annual Conference, Houston TX, October 2017.