Abstract
Appointment overbooking is one of the most popular ways to mitigate the risk of no-shows. Although appointment overbooking can improve resource utilization, it may also lead to adverse consequences such as increases in resource overtime and patient waiting time. While the majority of research on appointment overbooking focuses on the system performance within the session, our work aims to study the tradeoffs between schedule efficiency and timely access to service. We integrate a stochastic mixed-integer linear program, which assigns patients to appointment time slots, into a queueing model, which evaluates the timeliness of access to service. Our computational results suggest that when the session capacity is less than the appointment request rate, overbooking can greatly reduce appointment lead time and patient abandonment rate and only slightly increases resource overtime and patient waiting time. However, the benefits of overbooking become mild when the session capacity is larger than the appointment request rate.
Published Version
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