Modeling physician scheduling for high-cost areas in hospitals

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Jens O. Brunner; Professorin Dr. Katja Schimmelpfeng
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438507036

The health care industry in many developed countries faces an increasing demand, a mounting pressure to reduce costs and a shortage of qualified personnel. In particular, physicians in hospitals are a scarce resource that should be scheduled efficiently. This fundamental research project studies the physician scheduling problem with methods from mathematical programming (i.e., methodologies from Operations Research/Management Science). We develop innovate new optimization models for the physician scheduling problem with respect to the combination of flexibility, fairness and preferences of physicians. We study the effects of this combination in detail. In a next step, we relax the condition that input parameters like demand are deterministic. Assuming that some parameters are stochastic in nature makes our models more complex. We include robustness concepts into our modeling approaches and evaluate the resulting effects. Additionally, we combine the physician scheduling problem with the operating room scheduling problem. The operating room represents another scarce resource that should be scheduled efficiently in hospitals. Looking at the combined scheduling simultaneously is a challenging task but provides high potential for fundamental research. We study the problem’s underlying structures and develop new algorithms to find feasible solutions. We emphasize exact solution procedures like column generation based methods and develop new problem specific extensions. This enables us to understand the effects of different modeling aspects and the solvability of the mathematical models. Our investigated models and developed methods can be used to schedule other human resources in hospitals as well. Eventually, our findings can be applied to the health care sector as a whole and tremendously inspire and support other researchers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants