| Autor: |
Xie, Xiaolei, Fan, Zhenghao, Zhong, Xiang |
| Předmět: |
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| Zdroj: |
IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering; Apr2022, Vol. 19 Issue 2, p864-883, 20p |
| Abstrakt: |
Outpatient clinics typically face a critical issue in patient adherence to their clinic appointments and suffer a huge backlog of patients waiting to be seen. The goal of this study is to enhance care provider productivity and patient access through effective clinic appointment scheduling. To achieve this goal, we introduce discrete-time bulk-service queues to model the backlog dynamics accounting for the no-show behavior of patients and consider different overbooking strategies to reduce backlogs at a minimum risk of working overtime. Numerically stable solution procedures and approximation methods are introduced to significantly reduce the computational burden, making the queueing models a practical tool for outpatient appointment template design. The insights obtained from this work will support capacity planning decision-making and are critical to improving the operational efficiency of outpatient clinics. Note to Practitioners—The operation and management of appointment systems is becoming much more sophisticated these years; however, worldwide, outpatient clinics still suffer from a common conundrum, which is the extensive backlog accumulation. Patients not showing up to their clinic appointments are one of the major contributors to this issue. The overbooking approach, which redesigns the appointment system by releasing more appointment slots than budgeted, is typically employed to address this no-show issue. However, the practice of overbooking should be carried out carefully, and the performance of system backlog as well as the risk of overworking should be considered simultaneously. This work provides a practical tool to assist the management of appointment capacity in outpatient clinics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| Databáze: |
Complementary Index |
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