Paper Info
Title
Appointment Scheduling Under Patient No-Shows and Service Interruptions
Abstract
We consider an appointment-based service system (e.g., an outpatient clinic) for which appointments need to be scheduled before the service session starts. Patients with scheduled appointments may or may not show up for their appointments. The service of scheduled patients can be interrupted by emergency requests that have a higher priority. We develop a framework that can be utilized in determining the optimal appointment policies under different assumptions regarding rewards, costs, and decision variables. We propose two methods to evaluate the objective function for a given appointment schedule. We specifically consider two different formulations, both of which aim to balance the trade-off between the patient waiting times and server utilization and carry out a numerical study to provide insights into optimal policies. We find that policies that ignore interruptions perform quite badly, especially when the number of appointments to be scheduled is also a decision variable. We also find that policies that require equally spaced appointments perform reasonably well when the interruption rate is constant. However, their performance worsens significantly when the interruption rate is time dependent.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1287/msom.1120.0394
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Keywords
Field
DocType
optimal appointment policy,scheduled patient,interruption rate,service interruptions,patient no-shows,service session,decision variable,scheduled appointment,different assumption,appointment schedule,appointment scheduling,different formulation,appointment-based service system,service operations
Decision variables,Economics,Patient waiting,Scheduling (computing),Service system,Operations management
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
14
4
1523-4614
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.80
16
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jianzhe Luo1161.19
Vidyadhar G. Kulkarni253960.15
Serhan Ziya319818.57