Sequential appointment scheduling considering patient choice and service fairness

Effective appointment scheduling system is very important to the efficiency of the clinic and the satisfaction of the patients. In practice, the clinic scheduler usually assigns the patients to an available slot before the call terminates and the appointment time can’t be adjusted any more. In this paper, a sequential appointment scheduling method is proposed to balance the benefits of clinic and patients’ satisfaction considering patient choice and service fairness simultaneously. It determines the optimal booking number of patients and optimal scheduling time for each patient to maximise the profit of the outpatient clinic over a session-day. The profit considered in this paper is the total revenue of all arriving patients minus the cost of waiting time, idle time and overtime, which not only considers the rewards from booking decision, but also precisely formulates the charge on service process depending on scheduling. A general patient choice behaviour is incorporated into the model as well. Two myopic scheduling algorithms are developed to optimally solve the sequential appointment scheduling problems with and without considering service fairness, respectively. Particularly, instead of exhaustive search in every step, a property is identified to speed the search process by reducing search space in the proposed myopic scheduling algorithms. After analysing the effects of model parameters on the optimal schedule and system performances, some insights are obtained to help clinics manage sequential appointment requests. The results show that the objective function evolution is unimodal and the allowance of patient choice can increase the number of patients seen in a day, but lower down the expected profit on account of less flexibility. The clinics provide uniform service to patients arriving in different intervals at the expense of less mean and larger variance of the profit.