Coordinated Patient Appointment Scheduling for a Multistation Healthcare Network

Abstract

Outpatient services account for more than four-fifths of patient care in the United States, and most patients access these services via appointment scheduling. Because of the possibility of patient no-shows, healthcare providers usually rely on overbooking. If very few patients show up, it will leave hospital resources underutilized, whereas too many showing up will increase patient wait times and increase staff overtime costs. In a hospital or a network of clinics, where patients could enter and exit at various stations and have complex flow patterns, scheduling becomes even more of a challenge. In “Coordinated Patient Appointment Scheduling for a Multistation Healthcare Network,” D. Wang, K. Muthuraman, and D. Morrice propose a multistation network model that carefully strikes a balance between assumptions that allow tractability and assumptions that disallow real-world adoption. Given the complexity involved in solving the model, they explore a sequence of approximations and find one that offers a significant computational advantage.