Research On Outpatient Physician Rostering

With the rapid development of the medical industry and the continuous increase of the government’s investment in health care,how to realize the scientific and lean management of hospitals has become an urgent problem for hospital managers.As the earliest and most frequent place for patients to contact,outpatient department is the window for hospitals to provide external services.Its efficacy and quality of diagnosis and treatment directly affect the reputation of hospitals.However,when rostering for outpatient doctors in hospitals of our country,it is often estimated by the staff according to their experience that the number of doctors at all levels is needed,and then rostering plan is manually generated according to the doctor’s personal work plan and relevant hospital regulations.Such extensive scheduling method not only requires a lot of time and energy,but also is not easy to find a feasible rostering plan.The quality of scheduling is often not good enough,which may lead to poor effective utilization of doctors and lower satisfaction of doctors and patients.Therefore,the rostering problem of outpatient doctors is one of the key points when realizing lean management in hospitals.Existing studies on doctor rostering are more focused on foreign medical situations and less on outpatient treatment environment in China.In order to solve this problem,this paper studies the weekly scheduling problem of outpatient doctors from two aspects: forecasting the demand of outpatient doctors and modeling the rostering of outpatient doctors.The specific research contents are as follows:(1)In view of the uncertainty of the daily needs of outpatient department in hospital,a combination forecasting model of the number of outpatient visits is constructed.According to the relevant theory of health economics,the demand forecasting problem of outpatient doctors is transformed into outpatient visits forecasting problem at first.Then,according to the linearity and non-linearity of outpatient visits series,the combination forecasting model of outpatient visits based on SARIMA model and BPNN model is constructed by using the entropy method.The combination model can make full use of the good fitting ability of SARIMA model for linear features and BPNN model for non-linear features,thus improving the poor prediction accuracy of traditional single prediction model for this problem.Finally,the forecasting results of the number of outpatient visits are converted to the number of doctors needed by each shift(2)Aiming at the extensive management of hospital shift scheduling,a multi-objective optimization model of outpatient doctor rostering is constructed.Firstly,by analyzing the factors affecting the weekly scheduling of outpatient doctors,various constraints on the weekly rostering of outpatient doctors in line with the actual situation of outpatient diagnosis and treatment in China are summarized.Then,based on the principle of systematic benefit,the multi-objective optimization model for outpatient doctor scheduling is constructed.The objective of optimization is the lowest cost of doctors,the highest job satisfaction of doctors and the best continuity of the treatment process.What’s more,the equity theory is introduced to construct model.Finally,an example shows that the model can better ensure the optimal system benefit of the hospital,doctor and patient,and can maximize the satisfaction of doctors and patients under the guidance of cost objectives.The combination forecasting model of hospital shift outpatient visits based on the entropy method and the multi-objective optimization model of outpatient doctor scheduling constitute a complete outpatient doctor scheduling scheme,which can provide some reference for the actual outpatient doctor scheduling work in hospitals.