Master physician scheduling problem

In this paper, we study a real-world problem arising from the operations of a hospital service provider, which we term the master physician scheduling problem. It is a tactical planning problem of assigning physician duties to the defined time slots/shifts over a time horizon incorporating a large number of constraints and complex physician preferences. The goals are to satisfy as many physicians’ preferences and duty requirements as possible while ensuring optimum usage of available resources. We propose mathematical programming models that represent different variants of this problem. The developed models were tested on a real case from the Surgery Department of a large local government hospital, as well as on randomly generated problem instances. The computational results for solving the model are reported together with some comparison and analysis of the optimal solutions obtained. We show that this approach can significantly reduce the time and effort required to construct the master physician scheduling schedule.