Abstract
This paper studies the problem of clinical appointment scheduling when taking revisits into account. We consider two classes of patients: (1) routine patients who have made an appointment weeks in advance and (2) same-day patients who call in at the very beginning of the day, before the first clinical consultation begins. After the first appointment and consultation, patients might need an additional examination and a second consultation to confirm their health status. This paper aims to create an advanced scheduling method for both routine patients and same-day patients to optimise the expected weighted sum of three performance measures: patients’ waiting time, physician’s idle time and overtime. A stochastic programme model is constructed and solved by sample average approximation and benders’ decomposition. Numerical tests show that revisits significantly affect the three performance measures; to improve the hospital system’s operation management, both scheduling of appointment times and daily workload plans are taken into account.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1767-1779 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | International Journal of Production Research |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 19 Mar 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported in part by the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China [grant number 20120073110029]; Interdiscipline Foundation of Shanghai Jiao Tong University [grant number 11JCZ02]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71371123], [grant number 71131005].
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- advanced planning and scheduling systems
- applications in health care systems
- benders’ decomposition
- sample average approximation
- scheduling