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Computationally efficient evaluation of appointment schedules in health care

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  • De Vuyst, Stijn
  • Bruneel, Herwig
  • Fiems, Dieter

Abstract

We consider the problem of evaluating and constructing appointment schedules for patients in a health care facility where a single physician treats patients in a consecutive manner, as is common for general practitioners, clinics and for outpatients in hospitals. Specifically, given a fixed-length session during which a physician sees K patients, each patient has to be given an appointment time during this session in advance. Optimising a schedule with respect to patient waiting times, physician idle times, session overtime, etc. usually requires a heuristic search method involving a huge number of repeated schedule evaluations. Hence, our aim is to obtain accurate predictions at very low computational cost. This is achieved by (1) using Lindley’s recursion to allow for explicit expressions and (2) choosing a discrete-time (slotted) setting to make those expressions easy to compute. We assume general, possibly distinct, distributions for the patients’ consultation times, which allows to account for multiple treatment types, emergencies and patient no-shows. The moments of waiting and idle times are obtained and the computational complexity of the algorithm is discussed. Additionally, we calculate the schedule’s performance in between appointments in order to assist a sequential scheduling strategy.

Suggested Citation

  • De Vuyst, Stijn & Bruneel, Herwig & Fiems, Dieter, 2014. "Computationally efficient evaluation of appointment schedules in health care," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 237(3), pages 1142-1154.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:ejores:v:237:y:2014:i:3:p:1142-1154
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2014.02.058
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    6. Jiang, Bowen & Tang, Jiafu & Yan, Chongjun, 2019. "A stochastic programming model for outpatient appointment scheduling considering unpunctuality," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 70-82.
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    10. Christos Zacharias & Michael Pinedo, 2017. "Managing Customer Arrivals in Service Systems with Multiple Identical Servers," Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, INFORMS, vol. 19(4), pages 639-656, October.
    11. F. Davarian & J. Behnamian, 2022. "Robust finite-horizon scheduling/rescheduling of operating rooms with elective and emergency surgeries under resource constraints," Journal of Scheduling, Springer, vol. 25(6), pages 625-641, December.
    12. Deceuninck, Matthias & Fiems, Dieter & De Vuyst, Stijn, 2018. "Outpatient scheduling with unpunctual patients and no-shows," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 265(1), pages 195-207.
    13. Christos Zacharias & Mor Armony, 2017. "Joint Panel Sizing and Appointment Scheduling in Outpatient Care," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(11), pages 3978-3997, November.
    14. Yang, Xiaopeng & Zheng, Danheng & Sieminowski, Tammy & Paradi, Joseph C., 2015. "A dynamic benchmarking system for assessing the recovery of inpatients: Evidence from the neurorehabilitation process," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 240(2), pages 582-591.

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