Physician Shift Scheduling to Improve Patient Safety and Patient Flow in the Emergency Department

Emergency Departments (ED) act as the healthcare safety net for millions of people seeking medical care. To ensure smooth patient flow and efficient ED operations, it is crucial to maintain appropriate staffing levels and resource allocation. Although a well-recognized problem, ED crowding and patient safety concerns are still prevalent, with recent studies identifying ED as one of the leading departments prone to medical errors. This research focused on developing an optimization model to identify optimal physician staffing levels to minimize the combined cost of patient wait times, handoffs and physician shifts in the ED and testing in the simulation model. By generating two new shift schedules and testing them in the validated simulation model for a three-week period, we observed that patient time in the ED and handoffs can be reduced by as much as 27% and 26%, with a 1.4% increase in full-time equivalents compared to the current practices.