Research Of Outpatient Appointment Scheduling With Overbooking

One of the most important standards to measure a country’s level of economic development is the level of medical and health services, which is closely related to people’s life and well-being. But at this stage the supply-demand mismatching of healthcare resource still exists in our country. We not only need to continue to increase input in the construction of healthcare services, but also to improve the supply-demand matching efficiency of existing medical resources. Revenue management originated from the airline industry, and eventually grew into a complete and independent theory system, which had acquired a lot of theoretical and practical results in airline industry as well as other service industries. As one of the most important method in revenue management, overbooking makes great contributions to improve companies’ revenue and the efficiency of resource allocation. This paper elaborates the concept and features of revenue management and overbooking, discusses their implementations in outpatient appointment scheduling, analyses the theories’ applicability in healthcare industry, describes the appointment procedure with static and dynamic models, and finally arises the problems should be noted.Firstly, this paper reviews the history and development status of revenue management, especially the overbooking strategy, at home and abroad. This paper also summarizes the development status of outpatient appointment scheduling, and then points out the possible direction of future research. Meanwhile, this paper explores the applicability of revenue management in outpatient appointment scheduling. Combined with revenue management and overbooking strategies’ implementations in other service industry, this paper summarizes their application requirements, and then discusses the reasons and possibility to improve the efficiency of outpatient allocation by overbooking.Secondly, based on all the above analysis, the thesis gives the description of outpatient appointment procedure, and then builds a static overbooking model based on newsboy problem. Numerical analyses are given to verify the model, and then a substitutive model is presented. This paper also analyzes the effect of outpatient’s no-show rate’s distribution with a new model.Finally, this paper divides the outpatient appointment into two stages according to patients’ no-show rate, and establishes a two-stage single-resource dynamic overbooking model by dynamic programming, the optimal booking limits of each stage are given then. In the meantime, as the static overbooking model, this paper verifies the static model and analyses the influences of some important parameters by numerical analysis. At the very end, this article puts forward the potential directions and some extensions of the research.