Optimizing Daily Service Scheduling for Medical Diagnostic Equipment Considering Patient Satisfaction and Hospital Revenue

Gang Du, Xinyue Li, Hui Hu and Xiaoling Ouyang
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Gang Du: School of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China
Xinyue Li: School of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China
Hui Hu: School of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China
Xiaoling Ouyang: Department of Economics, School of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Management, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 9, 1-23

Abstract: Under the background of the unbalanced supply and demand of medical diagnostic equipment and rising health care costs, this study aims to optimize the service scheduling for medical diagnostic equipment so as to improve patient satisfaction by ensuring the equipment utilization rate and hospital revenue. The finite horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) was adopted to solve this problem. On the basis of field research, we divided patients into four categories: emergency patients, inpatients, appointed outpatients, and the randomly arrived outpatients according to the severity of illness and appointment situations. In the construction of the MDP model, we considered the possibility of cancellation (no-show patients) in scheduling optimization. Combined with the benefits and costs related to patient satisfaction, based on the value iteration algorithm, we took patient satisfaction and hospital revenue as the objective functions. Results indicated that, compared with the current scheduling strategy, the integrated strategy proposed in this study has a better performance, which could maintain the sustainable usage rate of large medical resources and patient satisfaction.

Keywords: MDP; scheduling; patient satisfaction; medical diagnostic equipment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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