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Outpatient appointment scheduling in a multi facility system

Published: 07 December 2008 Publication History

Abstract

This study evaluates appointment systems used in hospitals by incorporating appointment rules and patient characteristics. Using an experiment unit at an internal medicine department of a large outpatient ward in Nagoya university hospital, a number of prevailing assumptions were relaxed, and twenty-five appointment systems were developed combining five appointment rules with five patient sequences. These appointment systems were evaluated under two different environments namely no-show and patient punctuality, with each of the two-levels totaling one-hundred different environments. A best appointment system is capable of identifying the problems in terms of both patient waiting time and doctor idle time.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WSC '08: Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation
    December 2008
    3189 pages
    ISBN:9781424427086

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    • IIE: Institute of Industrial Engineers
    • INFORMS-SIM: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences: Simulation Society
    • ASA: American Statistical Association
    • IEEE/SMC: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers: Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society
    • SIGSIM: ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling
    • NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology
    • (SCS): The Society for Modeling and Simulation International

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    Published: 07 December 2008

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    WSC08: Winter Simulation Conference
    December 7 - 10, 2008
    Florida, Miami

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    WSC '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 249 of 304 submissions, 82%;
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