DSS (Decision Support System) for Allocating Appointment Times to Calling Patients at a Medical Facility

A variety of terms are used to describe medical facilities offering treatment to general patients—hospitals, clinics, etc. We will use the generic term hospital for such a facility. In this chapter, we will discuss one common decision making problem encountered in daily operations at such a facility. When a patient has a health condition that needs treatment, she or he calls her/his hospital for an appointment. The receptionist who receives that call asks the caller a few basic questions, like who her/his doctor is, and the reason for the call, etc. The receptionist then looks up the patient records on the desktop computer in front of her, and based on the data stored in that record, and information obtained from that phone call, she faces the decision making problem of selecting the date and time for the patient’s appointment with the required caregiver in the hospital subject to various operational conditions and requirements to optimize important objectives described in more detail later. At most hospitals, receptionists have to deal with hundreds of such calls every day, and the solution for the decision making problem in each call has to be found during the short duration of the call. The name used for procedures for solving such decision making problems occurring sequentially over the time with the requirement that the solution of each must be determined within a very short time of the problems occurring is real-time decision making algorithms. Clearly, receptionists at hospitals need a decision support system (DSS) installed on the desktop in front of them, which they can use to determine the appointment time with medical practitioners in the hospital to calling patients. This chapter deals with the problem of developing such a DSS.