AI System for Checking Clinician Calendar Conflicts

The problem

In day-to-day operations, separate calendars may allocate the same resource at the same time. When clinician, room and equipment calendars, procedure durations, leave and on-call records are scattered across different screens, documents or team records, problems do not become visible in time.

Fragmented data delays preparation of the conflict review list and forces staff to search manually for supporting evidence again. Before making a decision, the clinical planning manager and clinician have to complete missing fields and verify inconsistencies one by one.

A common exception is that a backup room, handover of duties or remote attendance may make an overlap valid. Incomplete or incorrect automation that overlooks this context could disrupt a valid schedule or leave a genuine conflict unresolved, so the output cannot be applied directly.

What we set out to improve

• Rate of confirmed genuine conflicts
• Rate of outputs corrected or rejected by the clinical planning manager and clinician
• Time between the source record and the review output

How the system works

1. 01 Define the scope of the review and the authorised clinical planning manager and clinician roles
2. 02 Collect the inputs: clinician, room and equipment calendars, procedure durations, leave and on-call records
3. 03 Check source identity, date, version and data freshness
4. 04 Combine times in a shared calendar
5. 05 Check resource dependencies
6. 06 Check the exception: a backup room, handover of duties or remote attendance may make an overlap valid
7. 07 Place low-confidence or inconsistent records in a separate human review queue
8. 08 Write the source identity, rule, output and time to the audit trail
9. 09 Have the clinical planning manager and clinician approve, correct, defer or reject the output

Methods we used

• Time-window and resource-availability rules
• Source, format, version and required-field checks for clinician, room and equipment calendars, procedure durations, leave and on-call records
• A missing-data warning instead of an estimate when inputs are missing or inconsistent
• Checking exceptions separately from the main rule
• Storing the source identity, rule result, conflict review list and human decision together

Where people stay involved

Data and security

Access to clinician, room and equipment calendars, procedure durations, leave and on-call records is limited to the minimum permissions required for each role. Identifiers and sensitive fields are masked where possible, and only the necessary section is sent to the model rather than the entire raw file. Access, outputs and decisions by the clinical planning manager and clinician are recorded; the system does not enter production until the organisation has approved the retention period and data location.

Who this suits

Frequently asked questions