Designing Quota Size and Patient Arrival Time in Multiple Block Systems
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Chang, Wei-Ting
Abstract
In this study, we consider appointment scheduling for a medical service with scarce resource while patients are required to make a reservation ahead. Two kinds of patients are observed with different average service times: the follow-up patient and outpatient. In addition, two types of patient waiting time are considered: waiting time of days and waiting time in the clinic. Waiting time of days is the difference between the time a patient requests an appointment and the time of that appointment. Waiting time in the clinic is the difference between a patient''s waiting time and the time he/she actually served. To effectively reduce the waiting time for patients, we propose a two-stage appointment scheduling system.
The first stage of the system deals with the waiting time in the clinic and is about quota assignment. We divided the opening hours into the same length of time slots and determine the best quota for each time slot, in order to achieve the lowest probability of patients waiting time exceeding a given tolerable time (POTT). Dynamic programming is used in this stage. The second stage is daily appointment system which addresses the waiting time of days. We consider system workload of each time slot, patient priorities and FCFS principle in IFB rule when scheduling appointments. In this stage, we use a simulation model to compare the proposed appointment policy with other two policies with four performance measures: patient delay proportion, average delay days, maximum delay days and standard deviation of delay days. The simulation data are collected from historical data of National Taiwan University Hospital.
Furthermore, we examine the proposed appointment rules under two different scenarios. The first scenario is we compare the performance of rules when we divided open hours into time slots. In the second scenario, we investigate that whether the open hours are divided into time slots with shorter time length or not will affect the performance of IFB policy. In conclusion, IFB rules performance is better than other two rules, and less likely to be affected by the number of patients entering the system. In the second scenario, the results show that schedule patients by time slots can significantly improve patients’ waiting time before treatment although the waiting time of days are slightly higher.
Subjects
預約系統
配額預約
動態規劃
系統模擬
病患延遲
Type
thesis
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