Residents’ clinical schedules don’t have to be as stressful as they tend to be. At least, that’s what one residency program decided and found a solution to address many of the common problems surrounding residency scheduling. Learn more about this innovative scheduling solution that may be coming to a program near you.
Exploring operations research
A number of factors play into poor satisfaction among residents when manually scheduling is in place. Those can include favoritism in the creation of the schedule and inequity across residents in the number of night shifts and the frequency of day-to-night shift transitions.
Automated scheduling based on operations research, on the other hand, can create a more equal playing field, ensure compliance with duty-hour requirements, accommodate personal requests and help ensure that residents in procedure-based specialty programs get the required number of cases.
“Manual scheduling issues have become an everyday part of graduate medical education but could be alleviated to some degree by adopting solutions other industries have used for years,” authors of a recent perspective piece in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education said.
Operations research has been used to address complex issues in health care since the 1980s when hospitals began applying research-based strategies to improve nurse scheduling and operating room utilization.
How one program is putting it into practice
Now residency programs are using operations research to maximize rotation schedules while balancing educational goals and service requirements in training. For instance, the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS) has partnered with several students and faculty from its Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering and the Center for Healthcare Engineering and Patient Safety to create operations research techniques that optimize scheduling.
Their collaboration has resulted in improved scheduling for staff in the UMHS pediatrics department, which now creates schedules for residents by simply pressing a button. Once the automated system creates a new resident schedule, it’s sent to the program’s chief residents and administrators for review.
“This has led to a number of benefits, including improved efficiency in schedule creations, elimination of favoritism in the creation of the schedule, and the ability to quickly recover from last-minute changes in the schedule. Perhaps even more importantly, these schedules can prioritize equity across residents in terms of the number of night shifts, the frequency of day-to-night shift transitions, [and] personal requests,” the perspective authors said.
Each of the perspective authors work as professors and residents at University of Michigan where they helped implement the school’s new scheduling system.
For more of their insights on operations research in residency scheduling, view the perspective piece in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education.
