An integrated approach to demand and capacity planning in outpatient clinics

An outpatient clinic serving two independent demand streams, one representing advance booking requests and the other same-day requests, is considered. Advance requests book their appointments through an electronic booking system for a future day, and same-day requests are served on the day they arise. Taking an integrated approach to demand and capacity planning, a policy formulation compatible with electronic booking systems is proposed that incorporates major operational levers suggested in the literature. It combines a static slot publication policy, which specifies the pattern under which slots are released to the booking system, with an allocation policy that dynamically adjusts the daily workload of advance patients. The optimal policies are found numerically by developing a novel queueing model that e?fficiently evaluates major performance metrics. The application of the model with real data, obtained from one clinic with carve-out delivery and another with advanced access, demonstrates substantial savings