Over the last decades, hospitals have faced increasing financial pressure due to rising costs and changes in reimbursement policies. One of the reasons for this development is the rising number of qualified personnel required to handle the consistently growing demand for hospital services. In the U.S., on average more than 50% of hospital costs are workforce related. In order to reduce these expenses without sacrificing quality of care, a stream of research has focused on building more efficient personnel schedules for nurses and physicians.

We provide the first review that focuses on quantitative methods for physician scheduling in hospitals. We describe the relevant characteristics of various investigated physician scheduling problems, such as the problem type, i.e. Staffing, Rostering or Re-planning problems, personnel qualification and experience, and the utilized shift types. Furthermore, we analyze the existing literature with respect to additional modeling features including fairness aspects and underlying demand patterns, as well as employed solution approaches and real life applications. In total, we review 68 relevant publications in the OR/MS field. We use our presented framework to categorize the existing approaches and highlight gaps in the literature to initiate future research activities.