The Optimization Of Outpatient Scheduling Under Multiple Providers And Devices

The purpose of outpatient appointment scheduling is to shorten patients’ waiting time,reduce medical costs and improve resource utilization with the consideration of patients’ arrivalpattern and doctors’ diagnostic characteristics. Different from western countries, the problems ofimperfect appointment mechanism, imbalanced ability of doctors and highlighted doctor-patientcontradiction all lead to long waiting time and high dependence on equipment examination.Therefore, this paper takes multiple providers diagnosis, multiple devices examination and revisitinto consideration and set up outpatient scheduling model in primary care. After modelverification and validation,3scheduling rules have been designed in the simulation, according tothe reality. And through the simulation experiment, optimal proportion and best appointmentinterval has been found.The simulation results are showed as follows:(1) Under the distribution of patients arrival (Sunday, Monday and Tuesday), the bestscheduling rule as follow: Patients divide into appointments and walk-ins are servedrandomly by providers, the appointment proportion is10%and appointment interval is35min, and appointments have priority. Under the distribution of patients arrival(arrival(Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday), the best scheduling rule as follow:Patients divide into appointments and walk-ins are served randomly by providers, theappointment proportion is10%and appointment interval is20min, in the first hour ofthe day only walk-ins are served, and appointments have priority.(2) Patients with different proportion and different appointment interval can affect thepatient’s waiting time, but can’t affect the utilization of doctor and device. Theutilization of doctor and device may have a relationship with the number of patient whoaccepts physician assessment one day.(3) It’s not necessary to set up the full-time doctor for the appointment or walk-ins.There are two innovations in this paper. First, the paper takes multiple providers diagnosis,multiple devices examination and revisit into consideration and set up outpatient scheduling modelin primary care. Second, the paper set scheduling rules in the appointments and walk-ins at thesame time existence circumstances, and simulated the situations of different scheduling rulesaccording to the different proportion and different appointment interval, then found the optimal proportion and best appointment interval through the analysis of the simulation results.