Hybrid Appointment for a Single-Physician Clinic with No-Shows and Overbooking
Motivated by observations of actual clinic operations,we design a hybrid appointment system(HAS)for a single-physician clinic,in which the system serves a mix of acute and chronic-care patient by allowing both advance and same-day bookings to increase patient satisfaction.Because of the existence of no-shows of regular patients who book in advance,to maintain their revenue,clinics must carefully manage patients access to balance the needs of regular patients with no-shows and same-day patients who always show up for their same-day appointments.In order to offset the negative effect of regular patients no-shows on clinic revenue,overbooking is introduced into this system.The clinic decides which appointment requests are accepted to maximize revenue.For this purpose,A Markov Decision Process(MDP)model with regular patients no-shows and overbooking is formulated.We characterize the structure of the optimal policies of the model.We prove that there exists an appointments threshold on the optimal policy for the model,and the threshold increases with the increase of no-show probability.
hybrid appointment system (HAS) single-physician clinic no-shows overbooking
Pingping CAO Jiafu TANG
School of Business Administration,Northeastern University,Shenyang,110819,China College of Management Science and Engineering,Dongbei University of Finance and Economics,Dalian,116
国际会议
长沙
英文
2680-2685
2014-05-31（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）