Optimization Analysis Of Hospital Clinic Appointment System:A Study Based On A Large Hospital In China

With the development of the economy,people are increasingly concerned about the quality and efficiency of health care services.As the population base is large and the aging is increasing,people’s demand for quality medical resources is also increasing.Large domestic public hospitals are faced with the problems that quality medical resources in short supply and lack of effective use.Although many large hospitals have implemented the appointment system of registered treatment,but some of the hospital’s popular department also have the phenomenon of the long queue.The imbalance of long waiting time and short treatment time,results in the patients’dissatisfaction with the hospitals.The increased burden of doctors also has led to an increase in hospital management costs.Therefore,the design of the appointment reservation system is very necessary in terms of reality.The domestic large hospital outpatient appointment system is the main research object of this article.And we also analyze the problems deeply which are arisen in the actual operation of the hospital appointment system.In the actual operation of the system,the uncertain demand,random service time,appointed patients with no-show behavior,non-appointed patients random arrival and other uncertain factors are likely to disrupt the hospital’s existing appointment arrangements,so that patients’ waiting time increases and the doctors work overtime or have unnecessary idle time.In order to reduce the negative impact of these factors,the hospital needs to arrange patients reasonably.In order to cope with the adverse effects of the above uncertain factors,this study has carried on the research to the outpatient appointment scheduling method.The main works of this paper are as follows:We provide a review of outpatient appointment scheduling literature.Through the literature review of appointment scheduling problems at home and abroad,it is found that the research on the scheduling problem of the appointment system abroad is relatively systematic,but the research on walk-in patients is relatively few.For domestic research,due to the late start of appointment system used in hospital,the study of the scheduling problem is not very mature compared to foreign countries.And many models are the expansions based on foreign research so that there are only a few models suitable for the domestic hospital situation.Therefore,it is very valuable to study the existing problems in the domestic reservation system and optimize the appointment system to make it more suitable for the present situation of our hospital.In this paper,we compare two different appointment modes,the fully appointment scheduling mode and the partly appointment scheduling mode.Through the comparison study of two kinds of appointment methods used in the domestic based on the change of no-show probability,the ratio of walk-in patients and the ratio of cost coefficient,we found that the performance of partly appointment system is better than fully appointment system when the no-show probability is low and idle time cost is high.When the no-show probability is high,it’s not a wise choice to increase the accepted number of walk-in patients.We study the time-based appointment systems with walk-in patients and no-show behavior.Based on the specific situation of domestic large-scale hospitals,this paper builds a sequential outpatient appointment scheduling system which is time divided.We jointly decide the schedule for the advance appointed patients and the receiving capacity of the patients who have not appointed in this paper in order to maximize the hospital net profit and also give solving method of the problem.In this model,the arrival of the walk-in patients follows the Poisson distribution,and the priority of the advance appointed patients is higher than walk-in patients,and the patients of the same type are treated in the sequence of the FCFS rule(first come first service).The patients’ service time follows the exponential distribution.The applicability of the model is verified by numerical experiments,and it is found that the ratio of cost coefficient has a great influence on the overall income.