Outpatient Scheduling in Health Care: A Review of Literature

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research on appointment scheduling in outpatient services. Effective scheduling systems have the goal of matching demand with capacity so that resources are better utilized and patient waiting times are minimized. Our goal is to present general problem formulation and modeling considerations, and to provide taxonomy of methodologies used in previous literature. Current literature fails to develop generally applicable guidelines to design appointment systems, as most studies have suggested highly situation‐specific solutions. We identify future research directions that provide opportunities to expand existing knowledge and close the gap between theory and practice.

Scheduling rules to achieve lead-time targets in outpatient appointment systems

“…These studies measure patients' waiting time, physicians' idle time, and/or physicians' overtime as the objectives. Cayiril and Veral [5], and Lakshmi and Sivakumar [17] summarized the large number of investigations of appointment scheduling. Bailey [1] is one of the pioneers who investigated the relationship between patients' waiting time and physicians' idle time to optimize the number of patients per session and the appointment interval.…”

Assessing the Queuing Process Using Data Envelopment Analysis: an Application in Health Centres

“…In numerous developing nations, such as Pakistan, almost all health organizations lack a set Appointment System, resulting in long waiting. The former works have emphasized on evaluating and improving patient flow and scheduling (Bhattacharjee and Ray, 2014) in different departments of the hospital including inpatients (Proudlove et al, 2007), outpatients (Cayirli and Veral, 2003), emergency (Gul and Guneri, 2015) and surgical/operations (May et al, 2011). However, there are only a limited number of studies which particularly assessed the flow of walk-in patients in health centres (Fetter and Thompson 1966;Rising et al, 1973;Ashton et al, 2005;Cayirli and Gunes 2014).…”

“…There are a number of different Operational Research (OR) techniques which have been used to assess the queuing problems or patient flow systems including, Queuing theory (Fomundam and Hermann, 2007;Mayhew and Smith, 2008;Lakshmi and Sivakumar, 2013), Discrete-event Simulation (Jun et al, 1999;Cayirli and Veral, 2003;Gunal and Pidd, 2010;Konrad et al, 2013), System Dynamics (Lane et al, 2000;Brailsford et al, 2004;Gunal 2012) in addition to others. However, none of the queue management studies have used the performance measurement technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).…”

An advanced queueing model to analyze appointment-driven service systems

“…Of particular interest is the distribution of the number of customers in the queue at the start of a service session because it indicates the probability of having to serve a certain number of customers during a given service session. [4] link this information to an "appointment system" (for a review of appointment systems refer to [3] among others) and create an appointment-driven queueing system that allows the analysis of appointment-driven systems as a whole. More specifically, an appointmentdriven queueing system analyzes: (1) waiting list performance measures (by means of the CAS); (2) server performance (e.g.…”