Managing patient service in a diagnostic medical facility
成果类型：
Article
署名作者：
Green, LV; Savin, S; Wang, B
署名单位：
Columbia University
刊物名称：
OPERATIONS RESEARCH
ISSN/ISSBN：
0030-364X
DOI：
10.1287/opre.1060.0242
发表日期：
2006
页码：
11-25
关键词：
摘要：
Hospital diagnostic facilities, such as magnetic resonance imaging centers, typically provide service to several diverse patient groups: outpatients, who are scheduled in advance; inpatients, whose demands are generated randomly during the day; and emergency patients, who must be served as soon as possible. Our analysis focuses on two interrelated tasks: designing the outpatient appointment schedule, and establishing dynamic priority rules for admitting patients into service. We formulate the problem of managing patient demand for diagnostic service as a finite-horizon dynamic program and identify properties of the optimal policies. Using empirical data from a major urban hospital, we conduct numerical studies to develop insights into the sensitivity of the optimal policies to the various cost and probability parameters and to evaluate the performance of several heuristic rules for appointment acceptance and patient scheduling.