A Patient Panel Assignment Strategy to Balance Provider Workload in Family Medicine.

Background/

Objectives

Appointment volume is a primary measure of provider workload and a key contributor to provider burnout in primary care settings. It is highly driven by the size and patient mix of patient panels assigned to providers. To ensure that workload is balanced among providers, an effective patient panel assignment strategy is essential.

Methods

A patient panel assignment framework was developed and demonstrated using a year of data from a large family medicine practice to assign patients evenly among providers with the following steps: 1. Predicting patient appointment needs using patient characteristics and Adjusted Clinical Group (ACG) scores; 2. Placing patients in appointment groups based on predictive appointment needs; 3. Determining the patient cap of each appointment group for each provider group; 4. Allocating patients from each appointment group to each provider group without exceeding the patient cap.

Results

The results were demonstrated across 100 simulated reassignments to a retrospective dataset. The variations in the number of appointments among providers within a provider group were compared between current practice and the proposed framework. For the largest provider group with 14 providers, the proposed framework with appointment prediction using all features reduced the standard deviation and range by 85% and 84%, respectively. While the proposed framework improved appointment workload balance among providers, 11.7% of patients required reassignment.

Conclusions

The proposed framework demonstrates its utility in supporting workload balance. Future work is needed to minimize patient reassignments while accounting for patient care continuity and to incorporate other contributing factors into the framework.