Partially partitioned templating strategies for outpatient specialty practices

Abstract

Templating strategies specify policies on capacity allocation and appointment booking, which are central to patient access management in outpatient specialty practices (SPs). In the widely implemented partitioned templating strategy, appointment capacity is allocated exclusively to each patient group defined by a combination of patient attributes and medical conditions, which often results in utilization challenges for SPs. Motivated by problems faced by an SP within a large academic medical center, we propose partially partitioned templating strategies that cluster patient groups into access classes and allocate appointment slots to these classes. We formulate a twostage stochastic optimization model to simultaneously optimize decisions on patient group clustering and capacity allocation in the templating strategy design. We develop an efficient solution algorithm for the problem, which otherwise poses a combinatorial challenge, based on Benders' cuts and an anticipatory approximation. Numerical experiments using real-world data show that the partially partitioned strategies outperform benchmark strategies used by SPs through maintaining a balance of high capacity utilization and providing timely access for priority patients. In addition, we study a wide range of SP setups for transferable insights on templating strategies based on practice specifics.

Capacity and surgery partitioning: An approach for improving surgery scheduling in the inpatient surgical department

“…There also exists related work studying whether other healthcare resources in a hospital should be pooled, e.g., the outpatient department (Vanberkel et al 2010, Bai et al 2023, the inpatient ward beds (Izady andMohamed 2021, Song et al 2020) and the emergency department (e.g., physicians and patient streaming) (Ferrand et al 2018, Saghafian et al 2012. From this literature, we mainly obtain three insights.…”