Abstract
Quality of medical services is even more critical than ever in a highly competitive health care industry. Long waiting time is a major source of patient dissatisfaction, thus, the issue of how to reduce waiting time to improve service quality is very important. A well-designed appointment scheduling system can effectively shorten the patient waiting time and enhance their satisfaction. This study aims to propose a framework for individualized outpatient appointment scheduling (OAS) in a dental clinic which composed of one attending dentist and two resident dentists. To design the OAS, firstly, the prediction model of the treatment duration of an individual patient was established by using artificial neural network. Secondly, discrete event simulation method was used to develop the simulation model which simulates the operations of the studied dental clinic. Finally, the established simulation model was used to evaluate the performance of the appointment scheduling. The proposed model consists of numbers of main features: 1) the service providers composed of multiple dentists with different professional competence levels; 2) there are two types of patients (return and not-return patients); 3) patient no-shows was considered; and 4) a variety of medical treatments (requiring different treatment time) are provided to the patients. The results of the study show that the proposed OAS can effectively improve the service performance of the dental clinic, this could be caused by patient’s characteristics were taken into consideration of building an appropriated appointment interval.
Highlights
The trend of health awareness and population aging has led to a surge in demand for health care recently in the developed countries
This study aims to propose a framework for individualized outpatient appointment scheduling (OAS) in a dental clinic which composed of one attending dentist and two resident dentists
Regarding the clinical session duration is considered ideal by administrators to fall within the range of 210 to 240 minutes, the appointment scheduling model proposed by this study shows that the clinical session duration is approximately 226.3 minutes, a reduction about 10% from 251.4 minutes under currently appointment scheduling model adopted by the clinic
Summary
The trend of health awareness and population aging has led to a surge in demand for health care recently in the developed countries. To provide adequate medical services to cope with the huge increase in the demand of medical treatment, the medical service industry is booming and people have been paying more attention to the quality of medical service. For providing good services to patients, medical institutions are committed to enhance their service quality. Outpatient care has become more common due to the introducing of new healthcare technologies, an emphasis on preventive medicine, and to reduce total medical expense. Outpatient visits increased 1.2% to more than 787 million in 2013, while inpatient admissions declined by 2% to about 35.4 million, according to annual statistics from the American Hospital Association cited in Modern Healthcare [2]. In Taiwan, the number of visits to the west medical clinics and dental clinic increased by 5.7% and 18.6%, respectively from 2005 to 2014 [3]
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