2021/05/04 by Alex Kuiper, Michel Mandjes, Jeroen de Mast +1
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Health Professions · Medicine · #Healthcare Operations and Scheduling Optimization #Healthcare Policy and Management #Hospital Admissions and Outcomes
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/deci.12517
crossref issued 2021/05/04 · crossref published 2021/05/04 · crossref published-online 2021/05/04 · openalex publication_date 2021/05/04 · crossref created 2021/05/04 · crossref published-print 2023/02/01 · crossref deposited 2024/08/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29
ABSTRACT Appointment scheduling is generally applied in outpatient clinics and other healthcare services. The challenge in scheduling is to find a strategy for dealing with variability and unpredictability in service duration and patient arrivals. The consequences of an ineffective strategy include long waiting times for patients and idle time for the healthcare provider. In turn, these have implications for the perceived quality, cost‐efficiency, and capacity of healthcare services. The generation of optimal schedules is a notoriously intractable problem, and earlier attempts at designing effective strategies for appointment scheduling were based on approximation, simulation, or simplification. We propose a novel strategy for scheduling that exploits three tactical ideas to make the problem manageable. We compare the proposed strategy to other approaches, and show that it matches or outperforms competing methods in terms of flexibility, ease of use, and speed. More importantly, it outperforms competing approaches nearly uniformly in approaching the desired balance between waiting and idle times as specified in a chosen objective function. Therefore, the strategy is a good basis for further enrichments.