Scheduling outpatient day service operations for rheumatology diseases

Rosita Guido (), Giuseppe Ielpa () and Domenico Conforti ()
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Rosita Guido: University of Calabria
Giuseppe Ielpa: University of Calabria
Domenico Conforti: University of Calabria

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, 2020, vol. 32, issue 1, No 5, 102-128

Abstract: Abstract Appointment scheduling systems represent a method to manage patient waiting lists effectively. This work advances an innovative quantitative approach for the outpatient appointment scheduling problems, based on an optimization model, to manage outpatient Day Service operations. It focuses on outpatient appointment scheduling. We start from earlier works in the literature to design models with the objective to maximize the number of patients’ appointments, to reduce patient’s waiting time, and to increase patient’s satisfaction. The proposed combinatorial problem is solved by Answer Set Programming, which is a declarative logic formalism, widely used in Artificial Intelligence and recognized as a powerful tool for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, to show the advantages of declarative programming for modelling and fast prototyping problem requirements. We apply the model to solve real-life scenarios of the Rheumatology domain. We compare the results on the real instance already solved in our earlier work and extend the computational experiments on some new generated and realistic instances. Since the computational times increase with the size of instances, we develop a three-phase solution approach based on patient’s priority. The heuristic approach is hierarchical and enables to solve more instances than the one-run approach within the computational time limit.

Keywords: Patient appointment scheduling; Clinical pathways; Patient-centred policies; Ambulatory care; Day service; Answer set programming; Artificial intelligence; 90B35; 68N17; 68T27; 68T30; 68T35; 68T37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1007/s10696-019-09354-7

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