Abstract

An outpatient clinic serving two independent demand streams, one representing advance booking requests and the other same-day requests, is considered. Advance requests book their appointments through an electronic booking system for a future day, and same-day requests are served on the day they arise. A compact policy formulation is proposed that incorporates major operational levers suggested in the literature. It combines a slot publication policy, which specifies the pattern under which slots are released to the booking system, with an expediting policy that adjusts the daily workload of advance patients. Relying on a wide range of numerical experiments, a heuristic search method is developed for finding the joint publication and expediting policies, minimizing the cost of overtime slots whilst ensuring a waiting and an access constraint is met. Several managerial insights are derived using a combination of illustrative and real data, highlighting the importance of taking an integrated approach towards the operational levers captured by our policy formulation.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© Elsevier 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publisher Keywords:	OR in health services, Outpatient clinics, Demand and capacity planning, Queues
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management R Medicine
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Management

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