Researches On Patient Appointment Scheduling Problem In A Cloud Healthcare System

With the improvement of living standard and the enhancement of health consciousness,Chinese residents have a high demand for the social healthcare services.However,people always tend to trust the tertiary hospitals that have high-quality medical resources due to the inadequate level medical system in China.This is the main reason why the large hospitals are always overcrowded,while the small hospitals are always idle.In order to solve this problem,Chinese government,healthcare industry and academia have begun to apply the Internet techniques into the healthcare system in recent years.As an emerging Internet healthcare system,cloud healthcare system can integrate the diagnosis and treatment of a patient in multiple hospitals together by using the Internet techniques,which can help utilize both the higher-quality medical resources in the large hospitals and the lower-quality medical resources in the small hospitals efficiently.Therefore,this thesis takes this cloud healthcare system as the target system and is focused on its key scientific issues that are originated from the practical demands of operations management in this new Internet healthcare system based on the theory of systems engineering and the methodologies in the field of operational research,management science,computer science,engineering mathematics and so on.The major research works in this thesis can be described as follows.Firstly,this thesis gives a detailed presentation on the general process of a cloud healthcare system based on the works of company interview and literature review.A Petri nets model is built to express the characters of asynchronization and concurrency in this system and then a simulation model is constructed by using the software of CPN Tools.Secondly,this thesis investigates the patient appointment scheduling problem that is one of key scientific problems in the operations management of the cloud healthcare system.A mathematical model with the objective function of minimizing the total system medical cost is presented for this problem.Finally,this thesis proposes a greedy-based heuristic to address the patient appointment scheduling problem in the cloud healthcare system through analyzing the features of its mathematical model.A series of simulation experiments are used to examine the validity of the proposed algorithm.Based on these research works,it can be observed that the Petri nets and simulation model of cloud healthcare system can express the static and dynamic characters of this system,and the mathematical model and algorithm of patient appointment scheduling problem can do help the operations management of cloud healthcare system.