Managing appointment-based services with electronic visits

Abstract

Electronic visits, or “E-visits” for short, have emerged as a promising channel for accessing healthcare and can significantly impact daily operations in healthcare facilities. However, there is a lack of research on how to efficiently manage appointments for outpatient care providers when faced with E-visits that exhibit different waiting cost patterns. Our study investigates how providers can use appointment scheduling as a “passive” control when patients have full access to the E-visit channel, to better utilise resources and reduce patient waiting. Specifically, we demonstrate that multimodularity still applies to the model with E-visits, despite their waiting costs being typically nonlinear. Furthermore, we analyse how providers can “actively” control the arrival of E-visits by scheduling their time windows. By examining the structures of the optimal joint schedule of appointments and E-visit time windows, and reformulating the problem into a two-stage program, we have designed an Accelerated Cut Generation Algorithm, which is shown to be efficient in our numerical study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the optimal scheduling of both appointments and E-visit time windows. By implementing proper scheduling, the negative impact of E-visits can be mitigated, their benefits to the provider can be enhanced, and overall operational efficiency can be improved.