A Proposition of Physician Scheduling Method for Improving Work-Life Balance

Due to the recent efforts to reform ways of working, it is important to expand employment opportunities and solve such current issues as the decrease in the working-age population and the balance between childcare and nursing care due to the diversification of working styles. To realize such an environment for work-style reform, the mechanism proposed in Society 5.0 that aggregates and analyzes real-space sensor data and feeds it back has been attracting attention. This mechanism is used in many fields, such as the transportation sector, construction, and the IT sector. However, in the medical field, it is necessary to satisfy the requirements for such actual medical practices such as the number of working physicians, the balance between their research and medical activities, and the educational activities by skilled physicians for junior doctors. This complicates creating system software to manage physician work assignments in an integrated manner. In this paper, we propose a physician-scheduling method to improve the work-life balance of physicians to reform ways of working in the medical field. Our proposed method reduces the workload on physicians by creating a duty roster based on the working environments of physicians according to an actual medical field. As a result of a simulation evaluation using our proposed method, we confirmed it significantly reduced the processing time to create a three-month duty roster for 51 physicians at a university hospital compared to a conventional method.