Using Simulation to Evaluate Provider Scheduling Heuristics in Specialty Outpatient Clinics

Scheduling providers in outpatient specialty clinics is often done in a non-systematic fashion as a result of providers having varying clinic time assignments. This is particularly challenging in academic medical centers and large health systems where providers have responsibilities outside of clinical duties. This leads to inconsistent use of clinic space, staff, and other fixed resources in addition to high variability in operational performance measures. In this paper we present a discrete-event simulation model used to evaluate heuristics for scheduling providers within a specialty clinic. The simulation model is developed and validated based on a specialty clinic within University of Minnesota Health. The scheduling heuristics are evaluated across multiple operational performance measures based on relative improvements compared to test cases from actual schedules used in practice.