Physician scheduling for outpatient department with nonhomogeneous patient arrival and priority queue

The growing demand for outpatient departments and prolonged waiting time of patients in recent years has made physician scheduling necessary to provide timely medical services. This study focused on the problem of scheduling physicians in an outpatient system with a nonhomogeneous patient arrival and priority queue, which exists in many Asian hospitals. In such a system, both patients with appointments and walk-in patients wait in a priority queue to see physicians, with the patients’ arrivals fluctuating throughout the day. In order to respond to time-related demands while simultaneously respecting physicians’ preferences for being on or off duty in some specific slots, a staffing optimization model was formulated. In addition, a physician rescheduling model was proposed for the case where a physician is unexpectedly absent. To solve the problem, a calibrated waiting time approximation-based genetic algorithm methodology was proposed. Its main contribution is the use of a data-driven analytical method to estimate the average waiting time of the two types of patients in a complex queuing system. The results of a numerical study and real case study in a Shanghai hospital showed that physician scheduling optimization on the basis of the proposed waiting time approximation method was effective and efficient when applied to the proposed outpatient system.