Appointment Scheduling Under Patient No-Shows and Service Interruptions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Luo, Jianzhe; Kulkarni, Vidyadhar G.; Ziya, Serhan
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• 刊物名称: M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1523-4614
• DOI: 10.1287/msom.1120.0394
• 发表日期: 2012
• 页码: 670-684
• 关键词: healthcare operations management; service operations; stochastic methods

摘要

We consider an appointment-based service system (e.g., an outpatient clinic) for which appointments need to be scheduled before the service session starts. Patients with scheduled appointments may or may not show up for their appointments. The service of scheduled patients can be interrupted by emergency requests that have a higher priority. We develop a framework that can be utilized in determining the optimal appointment policies under different assumptions regarding rewards, costs, and decision variables. We propose two methods to evaluate the objective function for a given appointment schedule. We specifically consider two different formulations, both of which aim to balance the trade-off between the patient waiting times and server utilization and carry out a numerical study to provide insights into optimal policies. We find that policies that ignore interruptions perform quite badly, especially when the number of appointments to be scheduled is also a decision variable. We also find that policies that require equally spaced appointments perform reasonably well when the interruption rate is constant. However, their performance worsens significantly when the interruption rate is time dependent.