An integrated approach to demand and capacity planning in outpatient clinics

Abstract

An outpatient clinic serving two independent demand streams, one representing advance booking requests and the other same-day requests, is considered. Advance requests book their appointments through an electronic booking system for a future day, and same-day requests are served on the day they arise. A compact policy formulation is proposed that incorporates major operational levers suggested in the literature. It combines a slot publication policy, which specifies the pattern under which slots are released to the booking system, with an expediting policy that adjusts the daily workload of advance patients. Relying on a wide range of numerical experiments, a heuristic search method is developed for finding the joint publication and expediting policies, minimizing the cost of overtime slots whilst ensuring a waiting and an access constraint is met. Several managerial insights are derived using a combination of illustrative and real data, highlighting the importance of taking an integrated approach towards the operational levers captured by our policy formulation.