Research Paper

In the introduction to this research paper, the necessity of an optimally functioning appointment scheduling system that could, for instance, improve patient satisfaction by reducing the expected waiting time in hospitals, is explained. Chapter 2 explains that a good scheduling system accounts, among other things, for unpunctuality from both doctors and patients, the heterogeneity of patients and the presence of walk-ins. The relevance of choosing a fair performance measure in which each patient’s expected waiting time should meet certain constraints is also emphasized in this chapter. Chapter 3 illustrates the setup of such a scheduling system. Initially, this was done by generating data and simulating a base scheduling system with fixed interval time slots. However, this schedule proved to be unfair and as a result, it was then optimized to produce the desired scheduling system with variable interval time slots. This was done by successively re-scheduling the appointment times of the appointment slots in the base schedule until the expected waiting times for patients scheduled in that time slot sufficed the set constraints. After analyzing the results in chapter 4, it was concluded that compared to the base scheduling system, this optimized appointment scheduling system, which uses variable intervals to schedule individual patients in a time slot, is fair. In addition to this, it does not negatively affect the idle time and overtime of doctors. The conclusion is therefore that hospitals should implement a scheduling system with variable interval time slots to schedule its patients, in order to reduce expected waiting times. Optimizing Patient Appointment Scheduling using Variable Interval Time slots iii