The Analysis of Feedback Patient Flow as A Retrial Queueing System in Chinese Outpatient Department

Abstract

In China, hospitals are not allowed to reject outpatients and are thus confronted with large patient flows. Thus, analysis of patient flow and optimization of patient flow are important to improve the efficiency of managing hospital operations. Based on the flow chart in outpatient department (OD), the diagnosis department has feedback patient flow as retrial customer in the retrial queuing theory. The retrial queueing system with feedback patient flow model is founded. Markov process analysis is carried out for the model, and the performance index of the system is obtained. The influence of feedback patient flow on system performance is analyzed by retrial queuing theory. Through the feedback of the change of patient flow probability, the analysis on the performance of the system is verified by numerical experiments. The study has a certain guiding significance for the healthcare patient flow operations management in OD.