The operational management of healthcare services is expected to directly touch patient experiences. Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MoHME) for the first time, as such, has sought to improve the operational management of healthcare delivery within a reform agenda by setting benchmarks for ‘number of visit per hour’ and waiting time in outpatient clinics of about 700 affiliated...

Chemotherapy outpatient scheduling is a complex, dynamic, uncertain problem. Chemotherapy centres are facing increasing demands and they need to increase their efficiency; however there are very few studies looking at using optimization technology on the chemotherapy scheduling problem. We address dynamic uncertainty that arises from requests for appointments that arrive in real time and uncert...

lean manufacturing is a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating wastes (non-value added activities) through continuous improvement by conveying the product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of production. in a more basic term, more value with less work. since lean manufacturing eliminates many of the problems associated with poor production scheduling and line balancing, lean ma...

Uncertainty plays a significant role in modeling and optimization of real world systems. Among uncertain approaches, fuzziness describes impreciseness while for ambiguity another definition is required. Vagueness is a probabilistic model of uncertainty being helpful to include ambiguity into modeling different processes especially in industrial systems. In this paper, a vague set based on dista...

In this research we develop a model that prescribes the (near) optimal appointment date for a patient at the moment this patient makes his request at the outpatient clinic. In order to differentiate between different types of patients, such as new patients, control patients and several grades of priorities, we distinguish two categories of patients. One category is characterised by a maximum re...

BACKGROUND Patient nonattendance in neurology and other subspecialty clinics is closely linked to longer waiting times for appointments. We developed a new scheduling system for residents' clinic that reduced average waiting times from >4 months to < or =3 weeks. The purpose of this study was to compare nonattendance for clinics scheduled using the new model (termed "rapid access") vs those sch...

Tendency to optimization in last decades has resulted in creating multi-product manufacturing systems. Production planning in such systems is difficult, because optimal production volume that is calculated must be consistent with limitation of production system. Hence, integration has been proposed to decide about these problems concurrently. Main problem in integration is how we can relate pro...

INTRODUCTION Improving outpatient resource utilization significantly enhances the efficiency of healthcare organizations. Substantial number of walk-in patients (average of 72% in our study) to outpatient services is a universal characteristic of Taiwan's healthcare organizations. Consequently, scheduling becomes extremely complicated and important. Selecting the right scheduling alternative, a...