Beyond Patient Classification: Using Individual Patient Characteristics in Appointment Scheduling

Scheduling patients involves a trade-off between the productivity of the service provider and customer service. This study considers how outpatient medical facilities can improve their appointment scheduling by incorporating individual patient information in the scheduling process. Specifically, we obtain data on patient characteristics and examination durations from a health clinic, describe how that data can be used to predict patient examination durations in the clinic's appointment scheduling system, and evaluate the benefit of using individual patient characteristics over a conventional classification method. Computational results illustrate this method of patient scheduling reduces an overall cost function comprised of patient wait time, physician idle time, and over time by up to 24.2%, particularly when patients are sequenced with short duration patients being scheduled first. Several environmental characteristics are found to play critical roles in determining the magnitude of the benefit, including patient punctuality, no-show probability, the clinic duration, the appointment rule used for scheduling, and the ratio of the physician's idle time cost to the patient wait cost. We also detail and evaluate a practical procedure for using heterogeneous scheduling under a fixed schedule.