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In the service industry, scheduling medical procedures causes difficulties for both patients and management. Factors such as fluctuations in customer demand and service time affect the appointment scheduling systems' performance in terms of, for example, patients' waiting time, idle time of resources, and total cost/profits. This research implements four appointment scheduling policies, i.e., constant arrival, mixed patient arrival, three-section pattern arrival, and irregular arrival, in an ultrasound department of a hospital in Taiwan. By simulating the four implemented policies' optimization procedures, optimal or near-optimal solutions can be obtained for patients per arrival, patients' inter-arrival time, and the number of the time slots for arrived patients. Furthermore, three objective functions are tested, and the results are discussed. The managerial implications and discussions are summarized to demonstrate how outcomes can be useful for hospital managers seeking to allocate their healthcare service capacities.

Scheduling approaches for conventional surgery operating rooms in a hospital treat surgeons as bottleneck resources directly, but do not deal with stochastic medical resources, leading to an uneven human resource distribution in optimizing medical resource scheduling. Thus, this research focuses on the dynamic configuration scheduling problem for stochastic medical resources. In this paper, the surgical operating room is limited, and the arriving calls (i.e., number of patients) are dynamic. When a patient arrives, the nurse anesthetist and anesthesiologist are limited, but the medical service duration per patient is random. We introduce the drum-buffer-rope (DBR) scheduling approach to analyze which types of medical resources become bottleneck resources for optimizing operating room scheduling. After verifying the effectiveness of the DBR method in uncertain situations, the Monte Carlo simulation is demonstrated.

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