Faculty scheduling: it should be easy.

In this issue, you will find a thought-provoking, somewhat formal, mathematical article about scheduling of radiologists’ time (1). It is very well done, and brings up many of the issues that those of us involved in Clinical Operations and rulesbased, expert-system, automated approaches to scheduling have struggled with over the years, as well as one that I never thought of. I often have stated that the business aspect of radiology has many similarities with the airline business: expensive equipment, well-paid highly trained employees, scanner slots or seats, and patients or travelers to fill those seats. When the airplane or scanner is unfilled or not in the air, it is not being fully productive. The airlines have appreciated and invested in the importance of automated and optimized crew scheduling for decades, because it is their third largest expense (we also have capitalized equipment but not fuel.) We in radiology have not, and with a few exceptions, still generally rely on manually generated spreadsheets, based on rules negotiated and agreed upon or dictated from above. One interesting debate, for example, is the ‘‘clumping’’ of academic time versus maximizing group flexibility in choosing vacation/ meeting time. You cannot have both. As described in the accompanying article, there is a rich background of mathematical methods for optimizing the solution of various similar problems in operations research. The recent era began at the end of World War II, with Danzig’s description of the simplex method linear programming solution to the classic traveling salesman problem (known as TSP): Given a set of locations and the distances between each and all of them, find a route that minimizes the distance traveled (2). It extends through the birth of artificial intelligence to the current time. Why is scheduling important, and what does computerbased automated or computer-assisted scheduling offer as an advantage? First is the issue of transparency and fairness. This has a positive effect on new and current faculty for recruitment and retention, one of the most important factors in the success of an academic department. Second is accountability. For each full-time faculty, everyone of the 250 nonholidayworking