Capacity planning with demand uncertainty for outpatient clinics

Thu Ba T. Nguyen, Appa Iyer Sivakumar and Stephen C. Graves

European Journal of Operational Research, 2018, vol. 267, issue 1, 338-348

Abstract: In this study, we develop a capacity planning model to determine the required number of physicians for an outpatient system with patient reentry. First-visit (FV) patients are assumed to arrive randomly to the system. After their first appointment, the FV patient may require additional appointments, and will then become a re-visit (RV) patient; after each appointment an RV patient will require subsequent visits with a given probability. The system must achieve a set of targets on the appointment lead-times for both FV and RV patients. Furthermore, the system must have sufficient capacity to assure that a given percentile of FV patients is admitted. We develop a deterministic model that finds the required capacity over a finite horizon. We establish the tractability of the deterministic model and show that it provides a reasonable approximation to the stochastic model. We also demonstrate the value from knowing the demands in terms of the required resources. These conclusions are numerically illustrated using real data from the Urology outpatient clinic of the studied hospital.

Keywords: OR in health services; Appointment lead-time; Capacity planning; Demand uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221717310494
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:267:y:2018:i:1:p:338-348

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2017.11.038

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().