The effect of three different scheduling strategies on patient related performance measures

In most hospitals there are patients who receive surgery later than required. Hospitals could solve this problem by simply increasing their capacities, but typically this is not an option. Serving patients late is a problem because their health condition can quickly worsen, exposing them to an increased health risk. This needs to be avoided, primarily from a humanitarian standpoint, but there is also a hidden cost perspective as a patient in a worsened health state is likely to require larger amounts of resources. In order to improve the current situation, the lateness of patients has to be quantified. Moreover, also the reasons for patients being scheduled late need to be understood. This understanding can be acquired by modeling the patient scheduling process. We were using a factorial analysis, on the one hand, to statistically quantify the effect and, on the other hand, to determine the codependence of three different scheduling mechanisms. Firstly, we tested whether it is beneficial to allow different groups of patients to be served the next day, that is, the day after they see a doctor for the first time. Secondly, we tested whether it is beneficial to allow some group of patients to be served on a FCFS basis. Thirdly and lastly, we investigated the effects of pushing low urgency patients more into the future in order to serve high urgency patients quicker. We will show extensive computational results to demonstrate the impact that combinations of the different scheduling mechanisms have on various patient related performance measures.status: publishe