Block appointment systems for outpatient clinics with multiple doctors

Block appointment systems for outpatient clinics with multiple doctors

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Article ID: iaor19992414
Country: United Kingdom
Volume: 49
Issue: 12
Start Page Number: 1254
End Page Number: 1259
Publication Date: Dec 1998
Journal: Journal of the Operational Research Society
Authors: ,
Keywords: simulation: applications
Abstract:

Studies of appointment systems have to some extent led to a wide acceptance of individual or block appointment schemes in private practice and outpatient clinics. Most of the studies assume there is one punctual doctor in a clinic, which is often not the case in reality. Motivated by observations of actual clinic operations, we develop a block appointment system for clinic operations with multiple random arriving doctors. Through extensive simulation studies, we identify properties shared by the best appointment schedules. With these properties we can design a scheme based on simulation search that provides the optimal schedule for a given scheduling environment in an acceptable computation time. A simple (suboptimal) appointment rule is also proposed.

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