Semi-online patient scheduling in pathology laboratories

Organizing integrated processes in cancer care

“…As an example, [153] consider the scheduling of appointments where examinations take place in the morning, after which diagnoses and treatment plans are determined in multi-disciplinary team meetings and the outcome is discussed with the patient in the afternoon. Rescheduling is allowed in [305], where involved departments may change a concept schedule, and in [17] where an arriving patient in a pathology emergency department laboratory is scheduled and other patients are rescheduled, such that the total waiting time of all patients is minimized.…”

“…Patient performance in flow-shop systems is measured by means of the direct waiting time [17,153,178,181,222,223], access time (also known as indirect waiting time) [34,50,147], and the rejection probability [5]. In single-appointment systems the direct waiting time is measured as the waiting time on the day of the appointment from the planned appointment start until the actual start of the appointment.…”

“…This way, researchers show that their approach gives (near-)optimal solutions. Second, the performance of a model can be compared to the current practice in a partnering hospital (e.g., [17,175]). This way, researchers show that their approach results in an improvement for their partnering hospital.…”

“…In total, we found 27 papers that model patient arrivals stochastically. In some cases, the robustness of a capacity planning or offline planning approach is evaluated by simulating the capacity-to-patient assignment in a stochastic environment, under the restrictions provided by the (deterministically determined) capacity planning [34,262] or offline planning [16,17,40,175].…”

“…Used methods include mathematical programming [17,40], heuristics [82,235], simulation [82,153,156,235,320], stochastic programming [236], constraint programing [125], genetic algorithms [17], and agent-based models [305,306].…”