Optimization-Based Tools for Creating Year-Long Residency Block Schedules

Participants:

Faculty/Clinicians/Staff: Heather Burrows, Amy Cohn, Sarah Hartley, Michael Lukela, William Pozehl, and with thanks to the many chief residents we’ve worked with throughout this project

Students: Tarek Bsat, Daniel Cao, PK Chellappan, Ryan Chen, Aaron Cohen, Erick Dagenais, Jhawan Davis, Theodore Endresen, Neil Gollapudi, Jordan Goodman, Junhong Guo, Lea Harris, Daniel Hazlett, Trevor Hoffman, Young-Chae Hong, Daniel Huang, Emma Hyde, Nate Janes, Michael Kalmus, Shamit Kikani, Anna Learis, Brian Lemay, Kevin Li, John Li, Emily Lindblad, Brittany Lopez, Peter Mayoros, Jonathon McCormick, Ian McKenzie, Jonathan Mogannam, Paige Mollison, Justin Moss, Asher Perlmutter, Shraddha Ramesh, Samantha Roth, Roshun Sankaran, Jordan Schebil, Brendan Schultz, Justin Steuer, Luke Stumpos, Haitian Sun, Muhammed Ugur, Zac VerSchure, Ji Wang, Kristine Wang, William Yang, Nicholas Zacharek, Gabriel Zayas-Caban, Bill Zhang, Yicong Zhang

Project Contact: [email protected]

Project Synopsis:

The University of Michigan Medical School offers residency programs across many disciplines. For many, annual block schedules are manually built by the outgoing and/or incoming chief residents. It is a highly time-consuming process to ensure that schedules meet stakeholder needs, such as personnel coverage and educational needs, as well as preferences, such as resident requests and program balance. Additionally, scheduling rules frequently change from year to year, which makes it difficult to design templates that work year over year. Our team has worked with three residency programs — Pediatrics, Internal Medicine, and Combined Medicine-Pediatrics — and formulated an integer programming model to build these schedules automatically, incorporating hard rules like service coverage requirements and resident educational requirements as constraints. Preferences like resident requests and program balance are also integrated in the model as objective metrics. Using our model, we have improved the satisfaction of resident requests pertaining to vacations and curriculum, schedule balance, and more.

Papers, Posters, & Presentations:

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