Physician Staffing in Telemedicine: A Simulation-Based Approach for a Network of CVS Minute Clinics

Telemedicine has seen rapid expansion partially because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped to reduce regulation regarding telemedicine availability. In particular, we are inspired by the minute-clinic model of CVS-Aetna, and in this paper, we build a minute-clinic simulation model to understand the proportion of time with which a nurse practitioner can obtain additional medical advice from a collaborating physician. We use this simulation to construct staffing policies for collaborating physicians to address staffing issues nationally. We compare our simulated staffing schedules with those from Gaussian and Binomial approximations and assess their quality. Finally, we develop staffing procedures when the physicians are restricted by state regulations and compare them to situations where there are no restrictions to understand the impact of the regulations.