Study On Outpatient Staffing And Scheduling To Improve Appointment Patients And Walk In Patients’ Satisfaction

Due to the growing demand for outpatient service and the severe shortage on medical personnel,the operation optimization of outpatient department has attracted great attention all over the world.In China,large general hospitals not only accept patients who make an appointment in advance,but also walk-in patients who register in the hospital on the same day.At present,patients suffer a long waiting time in the waiting room.The contradiction between the two types of patients is prominent,and the overall satisfaction is not high.Therefore,it becomes important to solve the problems about how to provide timely medical services for patients,balance the two types of patients,and thus improve the overall patient satisfaction.In view of the improvement of patient satisfaction,this paper puts forward the optimization scheme with practical guiding significance respectively from the macro system level and the micro operation level.At the macro institutional level,this paper puts forward a staffing optimization model considering doctors’ preferences and absences.A data-driven waiting time approximation method is proposed to estimate the average waiting time of two types of patients in such a complex queuing system.Then a Genetic Algorithm is applied to search the optimal staffing solution to decrease patients’ average waiting time.At the micro operation level,this paper optimizes the appointments allocation according to the patients’ nonstationary arrival in each period,and further proposes a priority ranking scheme based on the utility threshold to schedule the service priority of two types of patients in real time.The current satisfaction of each patient is quantified by the prospect theory model,and the average satisfaction of the two types of patients is maximized based on the simulation optimization algorithm.In the end,this paper collected the real data of a hospital in Shanghai through field research,and carried out case studies to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method,which are enlightening to the practice of healthcare management.