Women’s College Hospital Uses Operations Research to Create an Ambulatory Clinic Schedule

Notes. Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Toronto, Canada offers roughly 300 outpatient clinics every week. In this article, the authors describe a project started in April 2011 with WCH to design a new schedule for their clinics to accommodate a move to a new hospital building, which was completed in May 2013. They developed an integer programming model to optimize the assignment of clinics to timeslots and locations, based on the desire to minimize changes from the historical schedule. In cooperation with senior leadership of WCH, the authors tested multiple scenarios that explored changes to space utilization policies at WCH and ultimately generated a new clinic schedule, which WCH implemented in May 2013. In this paper the authors highlight the value the work has created for WCH and present lessons learned in development of the model and through collaboration with the WCH team. Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Toronto, Canada, offers roughly 300 outpatient clinics every week. In April 2011, we started working with WCH to design a new schedule for their clinics, to accommodate a move to a new hospital building that was completed in May 2013. We developed an integer programming model to optimize the assignment of clinics to timeslots and locations, based on the desire to minimize changes from the historical schedule. In cooperation with senior leadership, we tested multiple scenarios that explored changes to space utilization policies at WCH and ultimately generated a new clinic schedule, which they implemented in May 2013. In this paper, we highlight the value our work has created for WCH and present the lessons we learned in development of the model and through our collaboration with the WCH team.