Adaptive Scheduling of Non-Emergency Patient Transfers with Workload Balancing Constraints: A Mixed Integer Programming Approach

Abstract

Emergency Medical Services organizations are responsible for providing paramedic crews, vehicles and equipment to transfer patients from one location to another in emergency and non-emergency settings. In the non-emergency setting, they must solve difficult scheduling and assignment problems to ensure on-time arrival of patients and the efficient use of health care resources. The objective of this thesis is to develop a mathematical model that will assign Patient Transfer Units to non-emergency patient transfer requests and design a schedule that will minimize travel costs, balance workloads, and attempt to leave previously scheduled pickup times unchanged. This thesis also utilizes historical patient transfer data in the modelling process. The mathematical model provides decision support for the non-emergency patient transfer scheduling process.