AN ALLOCATION PROBLEM OF APPOINTMENT NUMBER TO THE SERVICE FRAMES USING THE EXPECTATION OF OUTPATIENT'S WAITING TIME

Abstract

Long service waiting time for outpatients becomes a more serious problem considering the secondary damage such as nosocomial infection in the recent COVID-19 disaster. In this paper, we propose a method to determine the possible numbers of patients with an appointment for each appointment slot so as to make the outpatient's service waiting times as short as possible in hospitals that introduce a medical appointment system in which two types of patients are mixed. One is a patient who comes to the hospital with an appointment, the other is a patient who comes to the hospital without an appointment. We get the possible numbers of patients with an appointment for each slot through an optimization problem which allocate the total possible number of patients with an appointment during the consultation time zone in the morning/afternoon among each appointment slot. The expectation of each patient's waiting time for the optimization problem is the one calculated from the model without considering idle time. So, we compare the waiting time of this model and that of a model with considering idle time. Taking this comparison into consideration, we formulate optimization problems mentioned as above and we show a numerical example based on actual hospital data.