Resident Rotation Scheduling for Categorical Internal Medicine Residency Program

Abstract

Residency program, a stage of medical postgraduate education, plays an important role in a physician’s professional competency. Each year a resident rotation schedule has to be created, and residents develop practical skills and receive faculty coaching in different rotations. The creation of rotation schedule is typically a manual process and thus falls into a sub-optimal solution due to many practical criteria such as the issues of burnout, professional development, and quality of care. This study is motivated by a resident rotation scheduling problem of Mayo Clinic Florida Categorical Internal Medicine residency program. By analyzing all requirements and relative importance, an optimization model is developed, aimed at the first draft of the resident rotation schedule. A desktop application is developed to provide program coordinators with a friendly user interface. Using the method and software proposed in this paper allows drafting the optimal resident rotation schedule to be achieved in seconds.