Spreadsheet Model Helps to Assign Medical Residents at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine

Abstract

This paper describes a spreadsheet model that was constructed to replace the manual assignment of medical residents in radiology to the on-call and emergency rotations at the University of Vermont's College of Medicine. It was created by a group of MBA students taking a Managements Science elective, and even though it contains in excess of ten thousand variables, it was easy to build and solve by lightly educated practitioners. Based of this group's work we discuss an approach that such end-user practitioners take in creating spreadsheet optimization models and synthesize a number of interesting observations. We also argue that spreadsheet models can provide a real alternative to scheduling in smaller-size problems where, despite the major advances in methodologies and software for personnel scheduling, manual scheduling still dominates.

Keywords: spreadsheet, medical, scheduling, end-user, modeling, integer, programming, optimization, constraint, constrained, OR, MS, application