An optimization model of outpatient appointment scheduling window with patient no-show

This paper is to investigate appointment system of an outpatient department in a large hospital in China-West China Hospital (WCH). Through survey, the efficiency of appointment system could be improved by controlling scheduling window. Usually, setting a reasonable appointment scheduling window can reduce patient no-shows and improve outpatient departmental resource utilization. So, the paper studies the problem of outpatient appointment scheduling window considering patient no-show. In this paper, we applied the queuing theory to develop an M/M/1/N model. The objective is to minimize the patient waiting time and physician idle time. Through our analysis, we found out that the queuing model is quasi-concave, and by performing numerical experiments, we verify the effectiveness of the model and its proposition of quasi-concave.