Capacity management of CT department with service time differences and emergency nonpreemptive priority

Jie Zhou () and Peng Guo ()
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Jie Zhou: Sichuan Normal University
Peng Guo: Guiyang University

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, 2022, vol. 34, issue 4, No 6, 960-978

Abstract: Abstract In the presence of different service times of regular patients and nonpreemptive priority of emergency patients at the same day, this paper considers an advance appointment-scheduling problem of medical resources in which a finite amount of same-day service capacity should be allocated to different patients. This booking problem is modeled as a dynamic programming (DP) problem. The structural properties of DP model analytically reveal a booking limit policy. The booking limit numbers of regular patients do not monotonically increase with their revenues because of the service time differences. A numerical analysis is provided to test the performance of our booking limit policy by comparing polices in previous studies. Simulation results show that our policy provides a positive improvement in terms of the total reward of the service system, even when patients do not have perfect adherence to appointments (e.g., patient no-shows and unpunctuality). The numerical experiments demonstrate that the dedicated medical resource cannot improve emergency patients’ access to service but deteriorated their direct waiting time.

Keywords: Operations research; Healthcare operations management; Dynamic programming; Different service time; Emergency nonpreemptive (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1007/s10696-021-09416-9

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