Michigan Medicine Infectious Disease Department: Efficient Attending Scheduling

Abstract

Assigning shifts in a hospital setting can often be complicated. Attendees often want fair schedules that avoid having them work long hours, on requested vacations dates, or back-to-back shifts that change hospital locations. There is also the complication of assigning attendings to shifts they are qualified to work based on their experience. It often takes a lot of time to manually create a single draft schedule with these constraints in mind and only becomes more time consuming to adjust and redraft a given schedule. The problem described above can be written as a linear programming model. This model can then be translated into code which generates schedules. A similar code exists from a different scheduling project and the task at hand is to tweak the current code to one that will work for this specific project. Therefore, the purpose of this project is to provide an automated system to generate an attendee schedule for the calendar year quickly and conveniently, even with complex constraints and rules.