Abstract
In this paper optimal outpatient appointment scheduling is studied. A local search procedure is derived that converges to the optimal schedule with a weighted average of expected waiting times of patients, idle time of the doctor and tardiness (lateness) as objective. No-shows are allowed to happen. For certain combinations of parameters the well-known Bailey-Welch rule is found to be the optimal appointment schedule.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bailey NTJ, Welch JD (1952) Appointment systems in hospital outpatient departments. Lancet 259:1105–1108
Cayirli T, Veral E (2003) Outpatient scheduling in health care: a review of literature. Prod Oper Manag 12:519–549
Denton B, Gupta D (2003) A sequential bounding approach for optimal appointment scheduling. IIE Trans 35:1003–1016
Hajek B (1985) Extremal splitting of point processes. Math Oper Res 22:543–556
Hassin R, Mendel S (2006) Scheduling arrivals to queues: a model with no-shows. Working paper
Hutzschenreuter A (2005) Queueing models for outpatient appointment scheduling. M.Sc Thesis, University of Ulm
Koole G, van der Sluis E (2003) Optimal shift scheduling with a global service level constraint. IIE Trans 35:1049–1055
Lau H, Lau AH (2000) A fast procedure for computing the total system cost of an appointment schedule for medical and kindred facilities. IIE Trans 32:833–839
Liao C, Pegden CD, Rosenshine M (1993) Planning timely arrivals to a stochastic production or service system. IIE Trans 25:36–73
Pegden CD, Rosenshine M (1990) Scheduling arrivals to queues. Comput Oper Res 17:343–348
Righter R (1994) Scheduling. In: Shaked M, Shanthikumar, JG (eds) Stochastic orders and their applications. Academic, New York
Robinson LW, Chen RR (2003) Scheduling doctors’ appointments: optimal and empirically-based heuristic policies. IIE Trans 35:295–307
Vanden Bosche PM, Dietz DC (2000) Minimizing expected waiting in a medical appointment system. IIE Trans 32:841–848
Vanden Bosche PM, Dietz DC (2001) Scheduling and sequencing arrivals to an appointment system. J Serv Res 4:15–25
Vanden Bosche PM, Dietz DC, Simeoni JR (1999) Scheduling customer arrivals to a stochastic service system. Nav Res Logist 46:549–559
Wang PP (1993) Static and dynamic scheduling of customer arrivals to a single-server system. Nav Res Logist 40:345–360
Wang PP (1997) Optimally scheduling N customer arrival times for a single-server system. Comput Oper Res 24:703–716
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0 ), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
About this article
Cite this article
Kaandorp, G.C., Koole, G. Optimal outpatient appointment scheduling. Health Care Manage Sci 10, 217–229 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-007-9015-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10729-007-9015-x