Research On Priority Queuing Strategies For Non-emergency Factors In A Certain Hospital

According to the requirements of "Action Plan for Further Improving Medical Services(2018-2020)" published by the National Health Commission of PRC in 2017,domestic hospitals should further expand the scale of appointments,and patients with appointments can be given priority in treatment.Therefore in the outpatient department priority patients include patients who have made an appointment,returning patients who finish examination in the same day,and some elderly patients who are eligible for priority treatment.Compared with those walk-in patients,the proportion and types of patients having priority with non-emergency factors are increasing,which led to diversity of queuing system structure.And priority-based queuing strategy is gradually concerned by hospital management researchers.However,in a series of evaluations of implementation of “Action Plan for Further Improving Medical Services”,the problems of low patient satisfaction and long waiting time were still serious.This implied there are some problems with the current priority-based queuing strategy.First,it was not clearly defined what is priority and how much priority patients could get according to their types.Second,jumping a queue was often allowed or ignored by the outpatient staff.These two problem caused the disorderly queuing phenomenon in outpatient department,further incurred unfairness.And these problems led to long waiting times for patients and low patient satisfaction level.With that inefficiency,the current priority-based queuing strategy in outpatient department is apparently not enough to confront with complexity of queue caused by increase of patient having non-emergency priorities.It is therefore necessary to investigate how priority affected the queue and decide an efficient priority-based queuing strategy in order to improve the order of the queue in outpatient department,and most importantly satisfaction of patients.Considering the characteristics of priority-based service in hospital outpatient department,it is necessary to limit the priority in order to keep service fair.Based on this a mathematical analysis method was used to model and analyze the queuing process with static priority strategy and its performance,under the operation status of the outpatient department of a certain hospital in 2016.With regard to the problem that the static strategy lacks the adaptability when the queuing environment changes,a dynamic priority queuing strategy was proposed with the patient satisfaction as the target.The performance under dynamic priority strategy was evaluated by the index of patient satisfaction which was formed by value function.In the dynamic strategy,waiting time targets are set for each type of patients,and the priority is set reasonably for patients based on TOPSIS evaluation algorithm.Finally,Anylogic simulation software was used to verify the feasibility of the two priority queuing strategies,and the appropriate priority queuing strategy with the highest patient satisfaction under different conditions is given.The simulation results showed that the priority queuing strategy can reduce the waiting time and increase the patient satisfaction.