This paper provides a comprehensive review of Appointment Scheduling (AS) in healthcare service while we propose appointment scheduling problems and various applications and solution approaches in healthcare systems. For this purpose, more than 150 scientific papers are critically reviewed. The literature and the articles are categorized based on several problem specifications, i.e., the flow of patients, patient preferences, and random arrival time and service. Several methods have been proposed to shorten the patient waiting time resulting in the shortest idle times in healthcare centers. Among existing modeling such as simulation models, mathematical optimization techniques, Markov chain, and artificial intelligence are the most practical approaches to optimizing or improving patient satisfaction in healthcare centers. In this study, various criteria are selected for structuring the recent literature dealing with outpatient scheduling problems at the strategic, tactical, or operational levels. Based on the review papers, some new overviews, problem settings, and hybrid modeling approaches are highlighted.
Home healthcare, a novel type of health treatment provided at residents’ homes for specific populations (elderly, disabled), is typically less expensive, more convenient, and efficient. The purpose of this article is to offer a paradigm for scheduling medical professionals from various medical institutes. With the need for home health care likely to expand significantly, future work is critical to lowering costs and ensuring service quality. The high expense of hiring nurses and doctors in this home health system (HHS) necessitates optimization approaches. To handle choice difficulties, we present a new algorithm that generates numerous scenarios, including current nurse schedules, the new demand under discussion, and future requests generated by the system. By analyzing several real-life factors and a new algorithm that produces numerous situations involving nurses’ schedules to solve three problems, the model offered is integer number programming. The results indicate which center each nurse is dispatched from, and each nurse returns to the original routing point. Finally, average daily visits increase by roughly 20%, while daily travel times of each visit drop by 50%.
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