A Research On Outpatient Appointment Scheduling Methods Of Specialist Clinic

With the improvement of living standards, people's awareness of health care is generally enhanced. However, the shortage of health care resources and the lack of effective use of them is prominent. Patients often need to wait for a long time and waiting rooms are crowded. In order to address them, the Ministry of Health decided to execute appointment service in public hospitals, with the help of appointment system (AS). Now there are a lot of researches in the academic world.Actually, some factors, such as no-shows, walk-ins and lateness, may influence original appointment scheduling, causing patients'waiting time, specialist's idle time and overtime costs. To deal with them, this paper studies appointment scheduling methods of specialist clinic. The main research work is as follows.(1) This paper treats outpatient appointment scheduling problem of single session under deterministic environment, considering no-shows and walk-ins. The objective is to minimize weighted sum of patients' waiting time, specialist's idle time and overtime cost. The AS design is divided into three steps. First is to determine total number of appointments, second is to list optional appointments scheme by enumeration, third is to choose the best scheme. Finally, the effectiveness of design method is verified by large scale numerical examples, and the effect of different environmental factors on the total cost is analyzed. The results show that cost ratio, proportion of walk-ins and fluctuating level of walk-ins impact total cost greatly.(2)This paper studies appointment scheduling problem of single session under uncertain environment, where'full appointments'concept is applied, no-shows and walk-ins are included. The goal is consistent with (1) and methods is similar to (1) too, but the third step which establishes a discrete system simulation model to optimize the problem is different. Then, the impact of different factors on total cost is analyzed by numerical examples. Finally, it is concluded that the cost ratio and proportion of walk-ins have great influence on total cost, and the impact of fluctuating level of walk-ins is negligible.This is different from (1).(3)This paper studies appointment scheduling problem based on (2), with the consideration of lateness. During the third step, two placement rules for late patients in the discrete system simulation model are designed. Scheduling goal is to minimize weighted sum of late patients'waiting time, punctual patients' waiting time, specialist's idle time and overtime cost. Examples are designed to verify these two rules, and contrast analysis shows rule 2 performs slightly better. It is also found that cost ratio and proportion of walk-ins have larger influence on total cost, and the impact of fluctuating level ofwalk-ins is negligible. In contrast, if lateness is introduced, the amplitude of impact decreases slightly.