The outpatient appointment system: Design of a simulation study

Patient flow based allocation of hospital resources

“…If it is not possible to make a step forward at this level of planning it does not make much sense to increase the planning effort at operational level. That is what I found out in my earlier research on outpatient appointment systems [Vissers, 1979; Vissers and Wijngaard, 1979] and in many projects in hospitals since then. The problem of waiting tirnes for patients in outpatient departments is not caused by a lack of planning at operational level but by the implicit decision about the service level in outpatient departments taken at higher levels of planning.…”

Scheduling rules to achieve lead-time targets in outpatient appointment systems

“…Many subsequent studies have addressed the appointment scheduling problem to derive an appointment scheduling rule or to evaluate various proposed appointment policies. An evaluation of the different appointment rules under various scenarios has been conducted in [3,12,16,18,25,28,29]. Furthermore, the development of an appointment scheduling policy to minimize some objective function was examined in [4,6,10,11,20,22,26,27,31].…”

“…Ho and Lau [12], Klassen and Rohleder [16], Su and Shih [25], and LaGanga and Lawrence [18] assume that patients show up on time. Blanco White and Pike [3], and Vissers [28] considered the lateness of patients while Vissers and Wijngaard [29] allow for early arrivals of patients. The effect of physicians' lateness was examined in [3,28,29].…”

“…Blanco White and Pike [3], and Vissers [28] considered the lateness of patients while Vissers and Wijngaard [29] allow for early arrivals of patients. The effect of physicians' lateness was examined in [3,28,29]. Klassen and Rohleder [16] and Su and Shih [25] include walk-in patients in their models.…”

Integrated decision making in healthcare : an operations research and management science perspective

“…Methods: computer simulation [14,85,90,133,160,178,179,239,254,255,288,303,323,332,333,348,380,417,458,503,504,514,518], heuristics [85,283,333], Markov processes [184,219,283,297,329,369,453], mathematical programming [27,85,129,418], queueing theory [58,115,151,299,320,418,503,535], literature review [89,229,282,451].…”