Forecasting Patient Arrivals and Optimizing Physician Shift Scheduling in Emergency Departments

Emergency Departments (EDs) are the primary access points for millions of patients seeking medical care. The increasing patient demand and lack of long-term dynamic planning strain the EDs in providing timely patient care, leading to crowding. While a well-recognized problem, ED crowding is still prevalent, where suboptimal resource allocation is one significant contributing factor. In this research, we developed an end-to-end solution that first forecasted the patient arrivals to the partner ED and then used an optimization model to develop an optimal physician staffing schedule to minimize the combined cost of patient wait times, handoffs, and physician shifts. Finally, the new schedule was tested using the validated simulation model to evaluate the ED performance. By generating shift schedules based on forecasts and testing them in the validated simulation model, we observed that patient time in the ED and handoffs could be reduced by 5.6% and 9.2% compared to current practices.