Sequencing and Scheduling Appointments with Potential Call-In Patients

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chen, Rachel R.; Robinson, Lawrence W.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Davis; Cornell University
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.12168
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 1522-1538
• 关键词: Appointment Scheduling; Sequencing; no-shows; same-day patients; Healthcare

摘要

This paper studies appointment scheduling for a combination of routine patients who book well in advance and last-minute patients who call for an appointment later that same day. We determine when these same-day patients should be scheduled throughout the day, and how the prospect of their arrivals affects the appointment times of the routine patients. By formulating the problem as a stochastic linear program, we are able to incorporate random and heterogeneous service times and no-show rates, ancillary physician tasks, and appointment delay costs for same-day patients who prefer to see the doctor as early as possible. We find that the optimal patient sequence is quite sensitive to the no-show probabilities and the expected number of same-day patients. We also develop two simple heuristic solutions to this combinatorial sequencing problem.