Patients nationwide experience difficulties in accessing medical appointments in a timely manner due to long backlogs. Meanwhile, patients do not always show up for their scheduled services, with significant no-show rates. Unattended appointments result in under-utilization of a clinic’s valuable resources, and limit the access for other patients who could have filled the missed slots. Medical ...

This chapter describes the history of production scheduling in manufacturing facilities over the last 100 years. Understanding the ways that production scheduling has been done is critical to analyzing existing production scheduling systems and finding ways to improve them. The chapter covers not only the tools used to support decision-making in real-world production scheduling but also the cha...

Alternative medicine in Bangladesh context means Unani/Ayurvedic and Homeopathic medicine. Government recognizes and patronizes allopathic (modern and western) medicine. This system through Government Institutions viz. hospitals and health care centres can offer services to only about 30% people. The other two systems (Unani/Ayurvedic and Homeopathic) can serve 50-60% people. Limited health man...

This paper examines the combined use of predictive analytics, optimization, and overbooking to schedule outpatient appointments in the presence of no-shows. We tackle the problem of optimally overbooking appointments given no-show predictions that depend on the individual appointment characteristics and on the appointment day. The goal is maximizing the number of patients seen while minimizing ...

Patient appointment booking, sequencing, and scheduling decisions are challenging for outpatient procedure centers due to uncertainty in procedure times and patient attendance. We extend a previously developed appointment scheduling model to formulate a model based on a two-stage stochastic mixed integer program for optimizing booking and appointment times in the presence of uncertainty. The ob...

This paper studies the real-life problems of outpatient clinics having the multiple objectives of minimizing resource overtime, patient waiting time, and waiting area congestion. In the clinic, there are several patient classes, each of which follows different treatment procedure flow paths through a multiphase and multiserver queuing system with scarce staff and limited space. We incorporate t...

This study investigates appointment systems (AS), as combinations of access rules and appointmentscheduling rules, explicitly designed for dealing with walk-in seasonality. In terms of ‘access rules’, strategies are tested for adjusting capacity through intra-week, or monthly seasonality of walk-ins, or their combined effects. In terms of ‘appointment rules’, strategies are tested to determine ...

Scheduling concerns about the effective allocation of limited resources over time. For the last two decades, many scheduling systems have been designed and developed for various applications in manufacturing, transportation and project management. As the complexity of the scheduling problem is getting more and more complicated, the development of scaleable and configurable systems become essent...

This paper presents a new model for online decision making. Motivated by the health care delivery application of dynamically allocating patients to procedure rooms in outpatient procedure centers, the online stochastic extensible bin packing problem is described. The objective is to minimize the combined costs of opening procedure rooms and utilizing overtime to complete a day’s procedures. The...

The scheduling of generalized pinwheel task systems is considered. It is shown that pinwheel scheduling is closely related to the fair scheduling of periodic task systems. This relationship is exploited to obtain new scheduling algorithms for generalized pinwheel task systems. When compared to traditional pinwheel scheduling algorithms, these new algorithms are both more efficient from a runtim...