Simulation and analytic hierarchy process to implement outpatient appointment system at Habib Bourguiba Hospital Sfax Tunisia

Abstract

The orthopedic outpatient department in the CHU Habib Bourguiba currently uses an appointment system (AS) based on the single block rule. This system makes patients arrive early to the session. This is the most primitive form of AS where patient must wait much before the consultation and waiting rooms that suffer from overcrowding. In this paper, we used the simulation process to evaluate twelve appointment systems that are the result of the combination of four appointment rules and three scheduling rules while considering the no-shows as environmental factor. The evaluation is measured according to the average waiting time for the three categories of patients, the use of both doctors and the average number of patients in the service during the session. Since simulation results did not give a dominant system, An AHP model was created in order to choose among the twelve alternatives. The appointment system IBFI / ALTER was chosen as the most suitable for the studied service. A sensitivity analysis was performed, and the chosen system has demonstrated its robustness against the evaluation criteria.