Abstract
In the presence of different service times of regular patients and nonpreemptive priority of emergency patients at the same day, this paper considers an advance appointment-scheduling problem of medical resources in which a finite amount of same-day service capacity should be allocated to different patients. This booking problem is modeled as a dynamic programming (DP) problem. The structural properties of DP model analytically reveal a booking limit policy. The booking limit numbers of regular patients do not monotonically increase with their revenues because of the service time differences. A numerical analysis is provided to test the performance of our booking limit policy by comparing polices in previous studies. Simulation results show that our policy provides a positive improvement in terms of the total reward of the service system, even when patients do not have perfect adherence to appointments (e.g., patient no-shows and unpunctuality). The numerical experiments demonstrate that the dedicated medical resource cannot improve emergency patients’ access to service but deteriorated their direct waiting time.
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Acknowledgements
This research was partially supported by National Science Foundation of P.R.China (71601135, 71671146,71532007), National Social Science Foundation of P.R.China (20BGL109,15BGL198), MOE Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (16YJC630180), The Talent Introduction Foundation of SUSE (2017RCL55). We thank the administrators, medical staff at Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital for their contribution to this work.
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Zhou, J., Guo, P. Capacity management of CT department with service time differences and emergency nonpreemptive priority. Flex Serv Manuf J 34, 960–978 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10696-021-09416-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10696-021-09416-9