Development and Evaluation of Heuristic-based Physician Scheduling Support Systems

• Main Authors: Ling-Ling Liu, 劉玲伶
• Other Authors: Ching-Wen Chien , PhD
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/25288432502016819090

碩士 === 國立陽明大學 === 醫務管理研究所 === 91 === Due to the insufficiency of residents, attending physicians have increased sharing, instead of supervising as usual, residents’ duty. The corresponding scheduling plans for the attending physicians are supposed to be dissimilar from those for the residents because both groups have different capability and responsibility. However the scheduling planning for the attending physicians have been rarely studied. The purpose of this study is to survey the preferences of the attending physicians for the rules of the scheduling, to develop scheduling support systems, and to evaluate the efficiency of the support systems. A questionnaire was submitted to 20 doctors of the Internal Medicine Department of a district hospital in Taipei city for their opinions about the rules for the scheduling of shifts and the design of the scheduling process. The questionnaire was designed by referring to literature and thorough discussions with samples of doctors. The scheduling support systems were developed using Microsoft Excel 2000 and VBA under an intensive prototyping approach. The evaluation of the scheduling support systems was done by comparing the performance of systems with those done manually in the indicators such as time spend and fairness. The results showed that the fitness of the shifts scheduled based on the attending physicians’ reservation and the fairness of sharing the weekend shifts were attending physicians’ major concerns. The scheduling support systems are comprised of 2 components: the data management and the system scheduling. The former handles with the management of personal data of doctors and their shifts, while the latter execute the functions of preparation for scheduling, setting the schedules for the physicians in the emergency department, scheduling for reserved shifts, estimating the share of shifts for each doctor, examining the potential conflict examination of physicians’ reservation among each other and scheduling. The evaluation results showed that the schedules simulated by the system were better than the manual approach in the fitness of the shifts scheduled based on the attending physicians’ reservation, the fairness of sharing the weekend shifts, and the time spent on scheduling. It was not easy to design a system comprising all schedules rules preferred by all physicians and making it completely automatically. Minor manual modification for the scheduling results set by the systems was still needed. However, this study has proved that the support systems could outperform the manual approach in many ways and suggested the values of further development of more dedicated systems.