Systematic Review of Opportunities to Improve Outpatient Appointment Systems

摘要

Outpatient clinics use an appointment system to distribute the demand over time and improve one or more performance measures such as patient waiting time, patient satisfaction, and resource utilization. In recent years, the practice of using same day and virtual appointments have led to a change in the appointment system design. In addition, several factors, such as appointment rules, patient flow, patient no-show and patient's preference, affect the performance of the appointment system. In this paper, a detailed review of the common characteristics that affect the appointment system is presented and future opportunities for the application of novel industrial engineering and operations research models to improve the appointment system design have been identified.