Capacity Allocation Policy of Outpatient Appointment Considering Cancellation of Appointment

Abstract

Abstract: In the practical outpatient appointment problems, scheduled patients may cancel their appointments before receiving services, which has a negative effect on clinic revenue. It's a significant problem to explore how to design a reasonable and effective capacity allocation policy considering the cancellation of appointment. In this paper, the capacity allocation problem of outpatient appointment which includes appointments in advance and in same-day is considered. Considering the situation that patients who make appointments in advance may cancel their appointments, an optimal capacity allocation policy is presented to determine the capacity allocation between patients who make appointments in advance and in same-day. For maximizing the expected revenue of clinic, the Markov process model considering cancellation of appointment is firstly constructed, and the relevant property is given. Furthermore, based on the model characteristic, the existence of the optimal number of patients who make appointments in advance is proved for any appointment period, and the optimal capacity allocation policy and algorithm of solving the policy are given. Finally, a numerical test is given to illustrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed capacity allocation policy.

Key words: management science, capacity allocation policy, Markov process, outpatient appointment, cancellation of appointment

摘要： 在现实的门诊预约问题中,已经预约的患者在接收医疗服务之前,有可能取消先前的预约,这会对医院的收益造成负面影响,如何在考虑患者存在取消预约的情形下,设计合理有效的能力分配策略来保证医院的收益,是一个值得研究的问题.本文针对具有提前预约和当天预约的门诊预约能力分配问题,在考虑提前预约患者可能存在取消预约行为的情形下,提出了一种提前预约患者和当天预约患者的最优能力分配策略。文中首先以医院的期望收益最大作为决策目标,建立了存在取消预约患者的医疗预约问题的马尔科夫过程模型,并给出了该模型的相关性质;基于所建立模型的特征,证明了对于任意的提前预约时段,存在提前预约患者的最佳数量,进而给出了提前预约患者和当天预约患者的最优能力分配策略以及确定该策略的精确算法;最后,通过数值试验说明了本文所提出的能力分配策略的适用性和有效性。

关键词: 管理科学, 能力分配策略, 马尔科夫过程, 门诊预约, 取消预约

CLC Number:

C931

CAO Ping-ping, TANG Jia-fu. Capacity Allocation Policy of Outpatient Appointment Considering Cancellation of Appointment[J]. Operations Research and Management Science, 2014, 23(2): 250-257.

曹萍萍, 唐加福. 考虑存在取消预约情形的门诊预约能力分配策略[J]. 运筹与管理, 2014, 23(2): 250-257.

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