In recent years, multidisciplinary teams and their meetings occupy a relevant role in health systems management (see for instance [1] and the references therein). Here we present a case study regarding the scheduling problem of the team meetings in a center for rehabilitation in developing age. Each patient, in its therapeutic path, is taken in charge by a team of operators generally composed by a doctor, a psychologist and one or more therapists. At the moment of the diagnosis and during the development of the rehabilitation, the operators of the team need to meet in order to discuss and monitor the progress of the therapies. These meetings take place in particular time slots, three for each day, called synthesis slots. In the weekly schedule of each operator, few of these slots are marked as synthesis slots for the operator and correspond to slots in which the operator does not carry out visits or therapy sessions. When a doctor requires a meeting for a patient, he/she also indicates a date when it would be preferable to schedule it. The high number of meetings and several additional operational constraints not always allow for a complete schedule of the meetings required for a given period. Moreover, several meetings have to be assigned to slots that are not synthesis slots for all the participants. This causes both a loss of quality in the service due to the cancellation of some therapy sessions and economic costs for overtime duties. As a consequence, the center has to face with the multi-objective problem to schedule as much as team meetings as possible by maintaining the costs and the quality of the service at a desired level. We designed a procedure for this problem based on an integer linear programming model and applied it in the last year to schedule the team meetings on a monthly basis. The results were quite satisfactory: the method allowed to both strongly reduce the queue of meetings waiting for being planned and decrease the costs of the schedules with respect to the past.
Scheduling team meetings in a rehabilitation center
Rinaldi Franca
2017-01-01
Abstract
In recent years, multidisciplinary teams and their meetings occupy a relevant role in health systems management (see for instance [1] and the references therein). Here we present a case study regarding the scheduling problem of the team meetings in a center for rehabilitation in developing age. Each patient, in its therapeutic path, is taken in charge by a team of operators generally composed by a doctor, a psychologist and one or more therapists. At the moment of the diagnosis and during the development of the rehabilitation, the operators of the team need to meet in order to discuss and monitor the progress of the therapies. These meetings take place in particular time slots, three for each day, called synthesis slots. In the weekly schedule of each operator, few of these slots are marked as synthesis slots for the operator and correspond to slots in which the operator does not carry out visits or therapy sessions. When a doctor requires a meeting for a patient, he/she also indicates a date when it would be preferable to schedule it. The high number of meetings and several additional operational constraints not always allow for a complete schedule of the meetings required for a given period. Moreover, several meetings have to be assigned to slots that are not synthesis slots for all the participants. This causes both a loss of quality in the service due to the cancellation of some therapy sessions and economic costs for overtime duties. As a consequence, the center has to face with the multi-objective problem to schedule as much as team meetings as possible by maintaining the costs and the quality of the service at a desired level. We designed a procedure for this problem based on an integer linear programming model and applied it in the last year to schedule the team meetings on a monthly basis. The results were quite satisfactory: the method allowed to both strongly reduce the queue of meetings waiting for being planned and decrease the costs of the schedules with respect to the past.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
