Appointment Scheduling in Primary Care with Recurring Visits

摘要

Traditional queuing systems schedule incoming customers in a queue waiting for service according to some predefined policy -- including first in first out (FIFO), shortest job first, or priority queuing. In the context of healthcare, traditional queues are seen in walk-in clinics or emergency room visits where the queue policy may be FIFO or based on patient criticality. Appointment-based schedules used in many primary healthcare providers, allow patients to schedule their appointment several weeks ahead of their desired date. Early scheduling may fill up all slots of a day much in advance, restricting other patients needing those slots at a shorter timeline. For a patient panel with varying number of annual visits, patients with higher frequency of visits may also experience frequent delays, thus denying them their desired access to healthcare. We explore the use of reservations in handling patients who frequently need to see their doctor at a relatively short notice as compared to most other patients. For the practitioner, using a reservation system can help reduce delay for the most needy patients and thus be able to provide adequate care they need.