Patient wait time and access to care have long been a recognized problem in modern outpatient healthcare delivery systems. Despite all the efforts to develop appointment rules and policies, the problem of long patient waits persists. Regardless of the reasons, the fact remains that there are few implemented models for effective scheduling that consider patient wait times, physician idle time, o...

Outpatient clinics’ productivity largely depends on their appointment scheduling systems. It is crucial for to understand the intrinsic heterogeneity in patient and service types act accordingly. This article describes an outpatient clinic dataset of consultation time with heterogeneous characteristics. The contains 6637 records collected from 381 half-day sessions between 2018 2019. Each recor...

In this paper optimal outpatient appointment scheduling is studied. A local search procedure is derived that converges to the optimal schedule with a weighted average of expected waiting times of patients, idle time of the doctor and tardiness (lateness) as objective. No-shows are allowed to happen. For certain combinations of parameters the well-known Bailey-Welch rule is found to be the optim...