Improving Access to Healthcare by Minimizing Appointment Delays

摘要

Providing patients with timely access to healthcare is an important issue for major healthcare providers. However, in resource-constrained environments, patients are often unable to schedule appointments with specialists within a reasonable time. We present a stochastic optimization framework to identify effective appointment scheduling strategies that maximize the proportion of new and established patients who can schedule appointments within a time threshold. Using a simulation model, we compare and contrast several scheduling policies.