Scheduling multi-disciplinary cancer clinics
Gréanne Leeftink
ABSTRACT
Many hospitals start multidisciplinary clinics to assure timely care for their cancer patients. Scheduling appointments in a multi-disciplinary clinic is complex, since coordination between disciplines is required. The design of a blueprint schedule for a multi-disciplinary clinic with open access requirements requires an integrated optimization approach, in which all appointment schedules are jointly optimized.
This research is motivated by several Dutch hospitals, which use a multi-disciplinary cancer clinic to communicate the diagnosis and to explain the treatment plan to their patients. Furthermore, also regular patients are seen by the clinicians. All involved clinicians therefore require a blueprint schedule, in which multiple patient types can be scheduled. We design these blueprint schedules by optimizing the patient waiting time, clinician idle time, and clinician overtime, using stochastic programming. Using this approach, robust blueprint schedules can be found for a multi-disciplinary clinic of the involved Dutch hospitals.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr.ir. Gréanne Leeftink is an assistant professor within the CHOIR research center and the Industrial Engineering and Business Information Systems group of the University of Twente. In December 2017 she obtained her PhD from the University of Twente with her thesis titled ‘Organizing integrated processes in cancer care’. During her PhD she collaborated with UMC Utrecht and Mayo Clinic.