An integrated overlapping and overbooking outpatient appointment scheduling system.

摘要

This research demonstrates an integrated overlapping and overbooking outpatient appointment scheduling system to maximize the clinic profit with balanced doctor idle time, patient waiting time, and provider overtime in an outpatient healthcare setting when the impact of patient no-show rate and walk-in rate are considered. In practice, outpatient healthcare providers should predetermine the outpatient appointment schedules in advance, which can optimize doctor utilization and reduce patient waiting time.;The integrated overlapping and overbooking outpatient appointment scheduling system model has been developed to find the optimal overlapping period and overbooking level. An analytical model is developed to measure the clinic profit. Thereafter, the Monte Carlo simulation model is developed to search for the optimal overlapping period and overbooking level from the developed integrated overlapping and overbooking outpatient appointment scheduling system model. Then, the proposed model is evaluated with various patterns of service time, no-shows, and walk-ins. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model is capable of improving the profit level of the outpatient clinic.