Integrated physician and clinic scheduling in ambulatory polyclinics

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated physician and clinic scheduling problem arising in ambulatory cancer treatment polyclinics, where patients may be assessed by multiple physicians from different clinics in a single visit. The problem focuses on assigning clinic sessions and their associated physicians to shifts in a finite planning horizon. The complexity of this problem stems from the fact that several interdisciplinary clinics need to be clustered together, sharing limited resources. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimisation problem. Given the inherent complexity for optimally solving this problem with a standard optimisation software, we develop a hybrid algorithm based on iterated local search and variable neighbourhood descent methods to obtain high quality solutions. Computational results using a set of instances inspired from a case study in a hospital in Canada along with some managerial insights are reported and analysed.

Keywords:

• Healthcare
• physician scheduling
• integer programming
• heuristics

Acknowledgements

The authors thank four anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a previous version of the paper.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly funded by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council under [grant numbers 418609-2012 and 402043-2011. This support is gratefully acknowledged.