Optimizing teleconsultation scheduling to make healthcare greener

Abstract

Some international organizations have called for greener healthcare in the post-pandemic era. Telemedicine has made an important contribution to achieving the goal of green healthcare by reducing the travel distance of patients. From the perspective of operation management, we put forward the teleconsultation room scheduling problem to get a better scheduling scheme to make telemedicine more low-carbon and green. First, we propose a deterministic teleconsultation room allocation scheduling model and a stochastic teleconsultation room allocation scheduling model. Then, we utilize some transformation techniques to simplify the models and solve them through numerical experiments. Next, we put the obtained scheduling schemes into the actual situation and compare them with the staff scheduling scheme. The results show that the stochastic programming model performs the best. In addition, the instability of the teleconsultation service duration has a great impact on the scheduling scheme. The telemedicine center should encourage experts from higher-level hospitals to provide more stable service time.