IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/orinte/v21y1991i5p1-11.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Staffing a Centralized Appointment Scheduling Department in Lourdes Hospital

Author

Listed:
  • Saligrama R. Agnihothri

    (School of Management, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000)

  • Patricia F. Taylor

    (Lourdes Hospital, Binghamton, New York 13905)

Abstract

Lourdes Hospital uses a centralized system to schedule appointments by phone for outpatients, inpatients, and other ambulatory services requested by physicians, their staff, hospital personnel, and patients. Customer surveys and an increase in customer complaints revealed lengthy delays in answering telephone calls. We used a queuing model to find the optimal staffing levels to handle the variation in call arrivals within a day. The problem was solved by just rearranging the work shifts, without adding any staff. We also provide an easy-to-reference generalized queuing table to aid others in deciding staffing levels where M/M/c approximation is appropriate.

Suggested Citation

  • Saligrama R. Agnihothri & Patricia F. Taylor, 1991. "Staffing a Centralized Appointment Scheduling Department in Lourdes Hospital," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 21(5), pages 1-11, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:21:y:1991:i:5:p:1-11
    DOI: 10.1287/inte.21.5.1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/inte.21.5.1
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/inte.21.5.1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aksin, O. Zeynep & Harker, Patrick T., 2003. "Capacity sizing in the presence of a common shared resource: Dimensioning an inbound call center," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 147(3), pages 464-483, June.
    2. Li, Yanfeng & Xiang, Ting & Szeto, Wai Yuen, 2021. "Home health care routing and scheduling problem with the consideration of outpatient services," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    3. Schwarz, Justus Arne & Selinka, Gregor & Stolletz, Raik, 2016. "Performance analysis of time-dependent queueing systems: Survey and classification," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 170-189.
    4. Brusco, Michael J. & Jacobs, Larry W., 1995. "Cost analysis of alternative formulations for personnel scheduling in continuously operating organizations," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 86(2), pages 249-261, October.
    5. Castillo, Ignacio & Joro, Tarja & Li, Yong Yue, 2009. "Workforce scheduling with multiple objectives," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 196(1), pages 162-170, July.
    6. Defraeye, Mieke & Van Nieuwenhuyse, Inneke, 2016. "Staffing and scheduling under nonstationary demand for service: A literature review," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 4-25.
    7. Ernst, A. T. & Jiang, H. & Krishnamoorthy, M. & Sier, D., 2004. "Staff scheduling and rostering: A review of applications, methods and models," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 153(1), pages 3-27, February.
    8. Duder, John C. & Rosenwein, Moshe B., 2001. "Towards "zero abandonments" in call center performance," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 135(1), pages 50-56, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:orinte:v:21:y:1991:i:5:p:1-11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.