Comparison of traditional and open-access appointment scheduling for exponentially distributed service time

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Abstract

This paper compares the performance measures of traditional appointment scheduling (AS) with those of an open-access appointment scheduling (OA-AS) system with exponentially distributed service time. A queueing model is formulated for the traditional AS system with no-show probability. The OA-AS models assume that all patients who call before the session begins will show up for the appointment on time. Two types of OA-AS systems are considered: with a samesession policy and with a same-or-next-session policy. Numerical results indicate that the superiority of OA-AS systems is not as obvious as those under deterministic scenarios. The samesession system has a threshold of relative waiting cost, after which the traditional system always has higher total costs, and the same-or-next-session system is always preferable, except when the no-show probability or the weight of patients' waiting is low. It is concluded that open-access policies can be viewed as alternative approaches to mitigate the negative effects of no-show patients.

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Yan, C., Tang, J., Jiang, B., & Fung, R. Y. K. (2015). Comparison of traditional and open-access appointment scheduling for exponentially distributed service time. Journal of Healthcare Engineering, 6(3), 345–376. https://doi.org/10.1260/2040-2295.6.3.345

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