Diagnostic clinics are among healthcare facilities that suffer from long waiting times which can worsen medical outcomes and increase patient no-shows. Reducing waiting times without significant capital investments is a challenging task. We tackle this challenge by proposing a new appointment scheduling policy that does not require significant investments for diagnostic clinics. The clinic in our study serves outpatients, inpatients, and emergency patients. Emergency patients must be seen on arrival, and inpatients must be given next day appointments. Outpatients, however, can be given later appointments. The proposed policy takes advantage of this by allowing the postponement of the acceptance of appointment requests from outpatients. The appointment scheduling process is modeled as a two-stage stochastic programming problem where a portion of the clinic capacity is allocated to inpatients and emergency patients in the first stage. In the second stage, outpatients are scheduled based on their priority classes. After a detailed analysis of the solutions obtained from the two-stage stochastic model, we develop a simple, non-anticipative policy for patient scheduling. We evaluate the performance of this proposed, easy-to-implement policy in a simulation study which shows significant improvements in outpatient indirect waiting times.

中文翻译：

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在诊断诊所安排患者时评估预约延迟

诊断诊所属于等待时间过长的医疗机构，这可能会恶化医疗结果并增加患者的缺席率。在没有大量资本投资的情况下减少等待时间是一项具有挑战性的任务。我们通过提出一项新的预约安排政策来应对这一挑战，该政策不需要对诊断诊所进行大量投资。我们研究中的诊所为门诊病人、住院病人和急诊病人提供服务。急诊病人必须在到达时就诊，住院病人必须在第二天预约。但是，门诊病人可以稍后预约。拟议的政策通过允许推迟接受门诊患者的预约请求来利用这一点。预约调度过程被建模为一个两阶段的随机规划问题，其中一部分诊所容量在第一阶段分配给住院病人和急诊病人。在第二阶段，根据他们的优先等级安排门诊病人。在对从两阶段随机模型获得的解决方案进行详细分析后，我们为患者调度制定了一个简单的、非预期的策略。我们在模拟研究中评估了这一提议的、易于实施的政策的性能，该研究表明门诊间接等待时间有显着改善。在对从两阶段随机模型获得的解决方案进行详细分析后，我们为患者调度制定了一个简单的、非预期的策略。我们在模拟研究中评估了这一提议的、易于实施的政策的性能，该研究表明门诊间接等待时间有显着改善。在对从两阶段随机模型获得的解决方案进行详细分析后，我们为患者调度制定了一个简单的、非预期的策略。我们在模拟研究中评估了这一提议的、易于实施的政策的性能，该研究表明门诊间接等待时间有显着改善。