Abstract
We present a strategic model to solve the long-term staffing problem of physicians in hospitals using flexible shifts. The objective is to minimize the total number of staff subject to several labor agreements. A wide range of legal restrictions and facility-specific staffing policies are considered. In general, the model is capable to incorporate different experience levels. In the simplest version the model decides about the number of staff for two experience levels, i.e. the number of residents (low experience) versus specialists (high experience). Shifts are constructed implicitly by the model and may have different starting times and several lengths. This allows more flexibility in the scheduling process. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer program and solve it applying a column generation based heuristic. Using data provided by an anesthesia department of an 1100-bed hospital, computational results demonstrate the usage of the model as decision supporting tool when staffing decision are made by hospital management.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bard JF, Purnomo HW (2005) Preference scheduling for nurses using column generation. Eur J Oper Res 164(1):510–534
Beaulieu H, Ferland J, Gendron B, Michelon P (2000) A mathematical programming approach for scheduling physicians in the emergency room. Health Care Manage Sci 3(3):193–200
Bechtold SE, Jacobs LW (1990) Implicit modeling of flexible break assignments in optimal shift scheduling. Manage Sci 36(11):1339–1351
Beliën J, Demeulemeester E (2006) Scheduling trainees at a hospital department using a branch-and-price approach. Eur J Oper Res 175(1):258–278
Beliën J, Demeulemeester E (2007) On the trade-off between staff decomposed and activity-decomposed column generation for a staff scheduling problem. Ann Oper Res 155(1):143–166
Beliën J, Demeulemeester E (2008) A branch-and-price approach for integrating nurse and surgery scheduling. Eur J Oper Res 189(3):652–668
Blöchliger I (2004) Modeling staff scheduling problems: a tutorial. Eur J Oper Res 158(3):533–542
Blum K, Offermanns M, Perner P (2008) Krankenhaus Barometer kompakt – Umfrage 2008. Technical report. Deutsches Krankenhaus Institut e.V, Düsseldorf
Brunner JO, Bard JF, Kolisch R (2009) Flexible shift scheduling of physicians. Health Care Manage Sci 12(3):285–305
Brunner JO, Bard JF, Kolisch R (2011) Midterm scheduling of physicians with flexible shifts using branch-and-price. IIE Trans 43(2):84–109
Burke EK, De Causmaecker P, Berghe GV, Van Landeghem H (2004) The state of the art of nurse rostering. J Sched 7(6):441–499
Carter MW, Lapierre SD (2001) Scheduling emergency room physicians. Health Care Manage Sci 4(4):347–360
Cezik T, Gunluk O, Luss H (2001) An integer programming model for the weekly tour scheduling problem. Nav Res Logist 48(7):607–624
Cheang B, Li H, Lim A, Rodrigues B (2003) Nurse rostering problems – A bibliographic survey. Eur J Oper Res 151(1):447–460
Cohn A, Root S, Esses J, Kymissis C, Westmoreland N (2006) Using mathematical programming to schedule medical residents. Working paper, Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Available at http://ioe.engin.umich.edu/techrprt/pdf/TR06-06.pdf
Desaulniers G, Desrosiers J, Solomon MM (eds) (2005) Column generation. Springer, New York
Ernst AT, Jiang H, Krishnamoorthy M, Sier D (2004) Staff scheduling and rostering: a review of applications, methods and models. Eur J Oper Res 153(1):3–27
Ernst AT, Jiang A, Krishnamoorthy M, Owens B, Sier D (2004) An annotated bibliography of personnel scheduling and rostering. Ann Oper Res 127(1):21–144
Franz LS, Miller JL (1993) Scheduling medical residents to rotations: solving large-scale multiperiod staff assignment problem. Oper Res 41(2):269–279
Jaumard B, Semet F, Vovor T (1998) A generalized linear programming model for nurse scheduling. Eur J Oper Res 107(1):1–18
Marburger Bund (2006) Der Arztspezifische Tarifvertrag für die Universitätsärzte. http://www.marburger-bund.de/marburgerbund/bundesverband/unsere_themen/tarifpolitik/tdl/tdl-028.php
Mihm A (2007) Krankenhäuser schlagen Alarm. FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung (online) http://www.faz.net/s/RubC43EEA6BF57E4A09925C1D802785495A/Doc~EB9067149F560459D998C1E8F7DE953E6~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html
Moondra SL (1976) An LP model for work force scheduling at banks. J Bank Res 6:299–301
MRI (2010) http://www.med.tu-muenchen.de/sprache/englisch/index.php
Ovchinnikov A, Milner J (2008) Spreadsheet model helps to assign medical residents at the University of Vermont’s college of medicine. Interfaces 38(4):311–323
Quadbeck E (2010) Krankenhäuser in Not: In Kliniken fehlen 5000 Ärzte. RP ONLINE (online). http://www.rp-online.de/panorama/deutschland/In-Kliniken-fehlen-5000-Aerzte_aid_821014.html
Purnomo HW, Bard JF (2007) Cyclic preference scheduling for nurses using branch and price. Nav Res Logist 54(2):200–220
Rousseau L, Pesant G, Gendreau M (2002) A general approach to the physician rostering problem. Ann Oper Res 115(1):193–205
Sherali HD, Ramahi MH, Saifee QJ (2002) Hospital resident scheduling problem. Prod Plan Control 13(2):220–233
Social Code V (2011) § 28 Paragraph 1. Sozialgesetzbuch. http://www.sozialgesetzbuch-sgb.de/sgbv/28.html. Accessed 11 January 2011
Stolletz R, Brunner JO (2010) Fair optimization of the fortnightly physician schedules with flexible shifts, working paper
Thompson G (1995) Improved implicit optimal modeling of the labor shift scheduling problem. Manage Sci 41(4):595–607
Thungjaroenkul P, Cummings GG, Embleton A (2007) The impact of nurse staffing on hospital costs and patient length of stay: a systematic review. Nurs Econ 25(5):255–265
Topaloglu S (2006) A multi-objective programming model for scheduling emergency medicine residents. Comput Ind Eng 51(3):375–388
Topaloglu S (2009) A shift scheduling model for employees with different seniority levels and an application in healthcare. Eur J Oper Res 198(3):943–957
White C, White G (2003) Scheduling doctors for clinical training unit rounds using tabu optimization. In lecture notes in computers science bookseries practice and theory of automated timetabling, vol IV. Springer Heidelberg, pp 120–128
Williams HP (2001) Model building in mathematical programming. Wiley, Chichester
Winston WL (2004) Operations research applications and algorithms. Thomson Brooks/Cole, Belmont
Wosley LA (1998) Integer Programming. Wiley, New York
Acknowledgement
We gratefully acknowledge the constructive comments of three anonymous referees.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Linearization
The linearization for constraints (1b) is as follows [37].
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Brunner, J.O., Edenharter, G.M. Long term staff scheduling of physicians with different experience levels in hospitals using column generation. Health Care Manag Sci 14, 189–202 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-011-9155-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-011-9155-x