A co-availability scheduling model for coordinating multi-disciplinary care teams

We introduce a co-availability scheduling problem that arises in various healthcare settings in which personnel from different disciplines work together as care teams and for which synchronisation of their availability impacts scheduling flexibility and procedure timeliness. Examples include breast cancer surgery involving oncologic and plastic surgeons, primary and specialty care integrated visits, and vascular interventions involving cardiac surgeons, radiologists and radiology technicians. We develop an integer programming model to help create optimal schedules that maximise the amount of co-available time across the scheduling templates of the desired team members, while still satisfying each of their clinic coverage, preference and extraneous responsibilities constraints. Application to breast surgery at a major cancer centre increased team co-availability by 94%, with sensitivity analysis in other scenarios producing 64–152%, increases in favourable team assignments, and without negatively affecting operating room neither utilisation nor surgery delays.