An overbooking scheduling model for outpatient appointments in a multi-provider clinic

Publication date: Available online 24 June 2015 Source:Operations Research for Health Care Author(s): Moh’d El-Sharo , Bichen Zheng , Sang Won Yoon , Mohammad T. Khasawneh In general, most outpatient clinics are staffed by more than one provider in order to satisfy high patient demand and distribute the overall workload. Although several overbooking scheduling models have been proposed in the literature for single-provider settings, it would be difficult to extend and apply them directly to a multi-provider setting. This research proposes an overbooking scheduling model for multiple-provider clinics to optimize the number of overbooked patients and maximize the expected profit. In addition, the proposed model incorporates various probabilities of patient no-shows to simulate actual outpatient clinic characteristics. Experimental results indicate that the proposed multi-provider overbooking model outperforms dissociated single-provider overbooking models in terms of increasing the expected profit by 19-24%, and the number of scheduled patients by 4.5-9%. The results also indicate that the expected profits will be maximized by redistributing overflowing patients based on providers’ workloads when varying the clinic schedule capacity, number of providers, and patient no-show probability.
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research