Appointment order outpatient scheduling system with consideration of ancillary services and overbooking policy to improve outpatient experience

Patient wait time and access to care have long been a recognized problem in modern outpatient healthcare delivery systems. In spite of all the efforts to develop appointment rules and policies, the problem of long patient waits persists. Despite the reasons, the fact remains that there are few implemented models for effective scheduling that consider patient wait times, physician idle time, overtime, ancillary service time, as well as individual no-show rate, and are generalized sufficiently to accommodate a variety of outpatient clinic settings. The goal of this chapter is to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery by developing a physician schedule that meets the clinical policies without overbooking using an innovative wait ratio concept, a patient arrival schedule from the physician schedule accounting for ancillary services, an evidence-based predictive model of no-show probability for individual patient, and a model-supported dynamic overbooking policy to reduce the negative impact of no-shows.