Dynamic allocation of same-day requests in multi-physician primary care practices in the presence of prescheduled appointments
| Autor: | Ana Muriel, Hari Balasubramanian, Longjie Dai, Sebastian Biehl |
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| Rok vydání: | 2012 |
| Předmět: |
Empirical data
Systems Analysis Time Factors education Medicine (miscellaneous) Primary care Efficiency Organizational Health informatics Health Services Accessibility Work hours Health administration Appointments and Schedules Medicine Operations management Primary Health Care business.industry Continuity of Patient Care humanities Stochastic programming Patient Satisfaction General Health Professions Group Practice Continuity of care business Heuristics Algorithms |
| Zdroj: | Health care management science. 17(1) |
| ISSN: | 1386-9620 |
| Popis: | Appointments in primary care are of two types: 1) prescheduled appointments, which are booked in advance of a given workday; and 2) same-day appointments, which are booked as calls come during the workday. The challenge for practices is to provide preferred time slots for prescheduled appointments and yet see as many same-day patients as possible during regular work hours. It is also important, to the extent possible, to match same-day patients with their own providers (so as to maximize continuity of care). In this paper, we present a mathematical framework (a stochastic dynamic program) for same-day patient allocation in multi-physician practices in which calls for same-day appointments come in dynamically over a workday. Allocation decisions have to be made in the presence of prescheduled appointments and without complete demand information. The objective is to maximize a weighted measure that includes the number of same-day patients seen during regular work hours as well as the continuity provided to these patients. Our experimental design is motivated by empirical data we collected at a 3-provider family medicine practice in Massachusetts. Our results show that the location of prescheduled appointments – i.e. where in the day these appointments are booked – has a significant impact on the number of same-day patients a practice can see during regular work hours, as well as the continuity the practice is able to provide. We find that a 2-Blocks policy which books prescheduled appointments in two clusters – early morning and early afternoon – works very well. We also provide a simple, easily implementable policy for schedulers to assign incoming same-day requests to appointment slots. Our results show that this policy provides near-optimal same-day assignments in a variety of settings. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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