Balancing Medical Resident Education and Workload while Ensuring Quality Patient Care

Medical residency is a requirement for medical professionals to practice medicine. Residency programs in internal medicine lasts 3 years and require residents to undergo a series of supervised rotations in elective, inpatient, and ambulatory units. Typically a team of chief residents develops a yearly rotational schedule that assigns residents to various departments for each week of the year, and for each day of the week. Scheduling resident rotations is complex as it needs to consider various academic, managerial, and legal restrictions while ensuring that the resulting schedules facilitate patient care and are balanced in terms of resident educational experience, workload, and resident satisfaction. This study proposes: (1) a multi-objective optimization approach for generating year-long resident rotation schedules; (2) an AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) model to compare schedules across multiple criteria and facilitate their adoption and implementation; (3) a methodology for studying the interaction between weekly and daily resident rotation schedules.; (4) an optimization based approach for ensuring continuity of care at outpatient clinics; and, (5) a methodology for evaluating resident assignment policies to outpatient clinics.