An optimization model to determine appointment scheduling window for an outpatient clinic with patient no-shows

Abstract Thispaper investigatesappointment schedulingfor anoutpatient department in West China Hospital (WCH),one ofthelargestsinglepointofaccesshospitalsintheworld.Our pilotdataanalysisshowsthattheappointmentsystematWCH can be improved through leveraging the scheduling window (i.e., the number of days in advance a patient makes an appointment for future services). To gain full insight into this strategy,ourstudyconsiderstwocases,basedonifpatientsare willing to wait for scheduled appointments or not. We developed a stylized single server queueing model to find optimal schedulingwindows.Resultsshowthat,whenpatientsareless sensitive to time delay (i.e., patients will wait for scheduled services),leveringschedulingwindowsisnoteffectivetominimize the total cost per day of the appointment system. In contrast, when patients are sensitive to time delay (i.e., patients may find services elsewhere), then our model considers the potential cost of physician idle time. The modeling resultsindicate that the total cost per day is relatively sensitive to the magnitude of scheduling window. Thus, adopting a proper scheduling window is very important. In addition, our study provesthatthecostfunctionsofbothcasesarequasi-concave, which are also validated by actual data drawn from the Healthcare Information System at WCH. A comparison of numerical results between two cases is made to draw further managerial insights into scheduling policies for WCH. Discussion of our findings and research limitations are also provided.Keywords Schedulingwindow .Outpatientappointment . Patientno-shows .Queueingtheory .Healthcaremanagemen