Sint Maartenskliniek turned group-therapy scheduling into an optimized blueprint

Sint Maartenskliniek, a specialized rehabilitation hospital near Nijmegen, runs patients through multidisciplinary programs that mix group therapy across disciplines — movement, occupational, psychology. Therapists and treatment rooms are shared across those disciplines, so the timetables interact; planners assembled them by hand, and every booking decision could collide with another discipline's session.

Together with the University of Twente's Centre for Healthcare Operations Improvement and Research (CHOIR) and the hospital's in-house Healthcare Logistics department, Sint Maartenskliniek replaced the hand-built timetables with an optimized tactical "blueprint": a schedule that prescribes the timing of each group-therapy session and allocates therapist and treatment-room capacity to those sessions, thereby defining which appointment types can be booked into which time slots.

The blueprint was integrated into a decision support tool used in daily operation. The mechanism is hierarchical: once the tactical layer is optimized and feasible, operational booking inherits feasibility — a planner can only pick slots the blueprint has already proven workable, so discipline-vs-discipline conflicts are designed out rather than repaired.

The approach is presented as deliberately generic: parameterized by session types and capacities rather than hardcoded to one hospital, so other multidisciplinary rehabilitation centers can rebuild the same blueprint for their own mix of therapy and staff.

Schedule capacity tactically so daily booking can't go wrong

Conflicts originate at the capacity level, not the booking level: group therapy couples several disciplines' calendars, so fixing one appointment locally breaks another.

The blueprint turns a weekly negotiation between disciplines into a solved model — once session timing and therapist-room allocation are optimized, daily booking becomes constraint-following.

Genericity buys reuse: because the model takes session types and capacities as parameters rather than hospital-specific logic, the same approach transfers to any multidisciplinary rehab center.

The team sat inside the hospital: Sint Maartenskliniek's own Healthcare Logistics department co-authored the work, so the blueprint encoded real clinical constraints instead of a vendor's assumptions.

When daily scheduling keeps failing, fix the tactical layer above it: an optimized capacity blueprint that constrains what can be booked beats firefighting individual conflicts.

A nine-author team from Sint Maartenskliniek, the University of Twente's CHOIR centre and Radboud University published the method in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics in July 2025 (volume 55, issue 4). Two of the authors, Nikky Kortbeek and Jasper Buil, are also affiliated with Rhythm, a Dutch healthcare analytics firm, pointing to deployment work beyond the case hospital. The paper frames the blueprint approach as a generic template for multidisciplinary rehabilitation care rather than a one-off fix.