Scheduling routine and call-in clinical appointments with revisits
研究在考虑复诊情况下，如何安排常规预约和当日电话预约患者的就诊时间，以最小化患者等待时间、医生空闲时间和加班时间的加权和，对医院排程管理有参考价值。
This paper studies the problem of clinical appointment scheduling when taking revisits into account. We consider two classes of patients: (1) routine patients who have made an appointment weeks in advance and (2) same-day patients who call in at the very beginning of the day, before the first clinical consultation begins. After the first appointment and consultation, patients might need an additional examination and a second consultation to confirm their health status. This paper aims to create an advanced scheduling method for both routine patients and same-day patients to optimise the expected weighted sum of three performance measures: patients’ waiting time, physician’s idle time and overtime. A stochastic programme model is constructed and solved by sample average approximation and benders’ decomposition. Numerical tests show that revisits significantly affect the three performance measures; to improve the hospital system’s operation management, both scheduling of appointment times and daily workload plans are taken into account.