A New Queueing Model for a Physician Office Accepting Scheduled Patients and Patients without Appointments

摘要

Family physicians play a significant role in the public health care systems. Assigning appointments to patients in an educated and systematic way is necessary to minimize their waiting times and thus ensure certain convenience to them. Furthermore, careful scheduling is very important for effective utilization of physicians and high system efficiency. This paper presents a new queueing model that incorporates important aspects related to scheduled patients (patients and clients are synonymous throughout this paper), patients without appointments and the no-show phenomenon of clients.