An Alternative Outpatient Scheduling System

Patient wait time has long been a recognized problem
in modern outpatient health care delivery systems.
Despite all the efforts to develop appointment rules
and solutions, the problem of long patient waits
persists. Regardless of the reasons for this
problem, the fact remains that there are few
implemented models for effective scheduling that
consider patient wait times as well as physician
idle time and are generalized sufficiently to
accommodate a variety of outpatient health care
settings. This book presents a solution for the
scheduling of procedures and appointments of any
given facility that both patient wait time and
physician idle time meet the declared scheduling
policies. Furthermore, this book provides the
implementation results from three case studies to
support the approach. The implementations confirm
that the system can effectively reduce patient wait
time as much as 56% without significantly increasing
physician idle time per patient.

Autorentext

Dr. Huang is an Assistant Professor in Industrial Engineering Department at New Mexico State University. He received his PhD, MSE and BSE degrees from Industrial & Operations Engineering Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Huang's research interests focus on process improvement in Health Care delivery systems.

Klappentext

Patient wait time has long been a recognized problem in modern outpatient health care delivery systems. Despite all the efforts to develop appointment rules and solutions, the problem of long patient waits persists. Regardless of the reasons for this problem, the fact remains that there are few implemented models for effective scheduling that consider patient wait times as well as physician idle time and are generalized sufficiently to accommodate a variety of outpatient health care settings. This book presents a solution for the scheduling of procedures and appointments of any given facility that both patient wait time and physician idle time meet the declared scheduling policies. Furthermore, this book provides the implementation results from three case studies to support the approach. The implementations confirm that the system can effectively reduce patient wait time as much as 56% without significantly increasing physician idle time per patient.