| The work introduces a new theoretical system designed to automate the scheduling of pediatric occupational therapy (OT) and physical therapy (PT) appointments across any number of regional service locations. The system automates the referral, evaluation, and treatment OT/PT careflow, and so scales the scheduling of appointments to the entire patient population at a time. The system selectively matches the patient's medical needs, the therapist's skillset, and the child patient's caretaker's weekday, time, and location appointment preferences. It uses multiple input channels operating under Separation Of Duties to gather decision-making intelligence, and a short-horizon, workload-balancing appointment request routing strategy to enqueue and roll-over appointment bookings. Five poll-sequenced and internally prioritized queues and the novel concept of softslots improve the odds of successfully booking a billable appointment. Simulations based on a case study showed that the new scheduling system improves patient access to care while it (a) preserves the therapist's discretion to change the patient's therapy plan based on the child's individual progress; (b) closely matches the patient's caretaker's appointment preferences and so reduces cancellations and no-shows; (c) improves the rate with which new patient referrals can be converted to billable evaluations and treatment plans; (d) more fairly and equitably distributes the patient caseload and paperwork among individual therapists; and (e) helps predict the smallest number of therapists needed at the hospital's main and multiple satellite locations.; Keywords. Patient Schedules, Therapist Workload, Hospital Occupational Therapy Department, Hospital Physical Therapy Department, Medical Workflow Optimization, Access To Health Care. |
