ACGME duty hour compliance--Medical resident scheduling

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this study is to create easy-to-use interactive computer simulation software that analyzes residency scheduling alternatives that comply with the requirements of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. The new guidelines constrain the number of days and hours that residents are available to work in teaching hospitals. Therefore residency directors need to evaluate schedule outcomes in multiple dimensions including cost, continuity of care, treatment quality, and quality of resident education. A desktop simulation software package that performs medical residency scheduling analysis will aid residency directors in their efforts to comply with ACGME criteria while maintaining quality physician education, quality of care, and patient safety. It will give medical residency directors the ability to analyze the potential pitfalls of a schedule in regards to resident educational experiences, staffing levels and costs, and the quality of patient care before implementation in the field. The Phase I specific aims are to: 1. Create a generalized Java-based simulation that replicates a validated residency scheduling model published in Management Science. 2. Incorporate new ACGME residency rules into the Java-based simulation model. 3. Simulate a current real system by calculating patient transition data and estimating physician activity time distributions. 4. Develop an intuitively understandable, platform-independent user interface that is designed to run on the desktop computers of residency directors. 5. Test and validate the updated simulation software using data collected from a real system. Better patient safety due to less care by tired residents has obvious immediate benefit, while maintaining or improving the quality of resident education affects patient care for the next half century. The interactive scheduling and desktop simulation technology resulting from the project will be extensible to other areas of healthcare process modeling. Ultimately, the Java-based software tool set will link models of a hospital's operational issues with disease state models to incorporate the local burden of disease.