Planning oncologists of ambulatory care units

This paper addresses the problem of determining the work schedule, called medical planning, of oncologists for chemotherapy of oncology patients at ambulatory care units. A mixed integer programming (MIP) model is proposed for medical planning in order to best balance bed capacity requirements under capacity constraints of key resources such as beds and oncologists. The most salient feature of the MIP model is the explicit modeling of specific features of chemotherapy such as treatment protocols. The medical planning problem is proved to be NP-complete. A three-stage approach is proposed for determining good medical planning in reasonable computational time. From numerical experiments based on field data, the three-stage approach takes less than 10 min and always outperforms the direct application of MIP solvers with 10 h CPU time. Compared with the current planning, the three-stage approach reduces the peak daily bed capacity requirement by 20 h to 45 h while the maximum theoretical daily bed capacity is 162 h. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.