Block appointment systems for outpatient clinics with multiple doctors. (English) Zbl 1140.90450

Liu, L.; Liu, X.

J. Oper. Res. Soc. 49, No. 12, 1254-1259 (1998).

Summary: 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.

MSC:

90B90	Case-oriented studies in operations research
90B22	Queues and service in operations research

Keywords:

block appointment; outpatient clinics; simulation