A Day-based Appointment Scheduling for the Medical Service with Limited Resources

This study considers an appointment scheduling problem for medical services with limited resources. In this type of medical service, the medical resource or equipment can only offer a limited number of services for patients each day and its capacity is costly to expand. In addition, patients have different required ranges of time to access the service based on their diagnostic urgencies and they may have their own preferred appointment timeslots. Based on an appointment rule, the appointment system assigns a timeslot to each patient.
In this research, we propose two appointment scheduling rules: IFB (Improved FCFSBU) and IFBP (Improved FCFSBU with Patient Preference). IFB combines two appointment policies: “First Come First Serve (FCFS)” and “Balance Utilization (BU)”. When a patient accesses the appointment system, the system will calculate a score for every timeslot within his/her required ranges of time based on FCFS and BU and assign the best timeslot to the patient. Moreover, according to the system’s status, the appointment system will dynamically adjust the weights of these two policies when calculating scores. Furthermore, IFBP considers a patient’s preference for services timeslots. IFBP attempts to make the patients receive the medical service not only within their required ranges of time but also in their preferred timeslots.
In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed appointment rules, a simulation is conducted. We use a practical case as the simulation model and compare the proposed rules with others. The result shows that a higher proportion of patients can receive the medical service in their required timespan when using IFB. In addition, patients have more chances to make appointments in their preferred timeslots when adopting IFBP.