ICE

Participants:

Faculty/Clinicians/Staff: Amy Cohn, Joseph House, William Pozehl, Angie Sullivan
Students: Katherine Adams, Wesley Chen, Anna Learis, Jonathan Mogannam, Anna Munaco, Samantha Roth, Roshun Sankaran, Chloe Smither, Hannah Strat, Zhipeng Xu

Project Contact: [email protected]

Project Synopsis:

The Interprofessional Clinical Experience (ICE) provides clinical exposure for first-year medical students to encourage early interactions with patients and all healthcare team members at Michigan Medicine. Students are assigned to clinical rotations during the fall and winter semesters to gain experience in the clinical environment.

Students should be assigned to both a hospital-based experience and an outpatient experience during the two semesters. Each clinic has a minimum and maximum number of students that should be assigned to it. With variable clinic capacities and the 150+ medical students in the class, we collaborated together to develop a scheduling tool for the ICE program coordinators to use in creating students assignments.

This tool is implemented in Excel using OpenSolver. It ensures that each student is assigned to a clinic that meets their travel restrictions and class restrictions, and aims to assign them to clinics that meet their preferences. Building the schedules for the semester-long clinical assignments is a multi-criteria objective problem that considers student preferences, capabilities, and inpatient-outpatient clinical environment requirements.

Our work in creating and implementing a binary integer program to assign medical students to clinics has resulted in significant reduction of program administrator workload. Additionally, medical students are now more likely to be assigned to clinics they desired, resulting in meaningful experiences and possibly a better idea of their future specialties and career paths.

Papers, Posters, & Presentations:

Posters: