Journal
JOURNAL OF THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
Volume 58, Issue 2, Pages 235-245Publisher
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602242
Keywords
scheduling; health services; optimization; simulation; reservation policies; waiting times
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We present a method to increase the utilization of and reduce the waiting times for an under-capacitated diagnostic resource in the presence of uncertain demand with several priority levels. We consider the case of a computed tomography (CT) scanning department that services both high-priority in-patients and lower priority outpatients. Current practice calls for all in-patient demand to be met on the day of the request. Our proposal looks at the benefit of reserving space for carrying over a percentage of non-emergency in-patient demand to the next day and utilizing a pool of on-call outpatients who can respond quickly to available capacity. We formulate and solve an optimization problem that returns a reservation policy that minimizes unused capacity subject to an overtime constraint. We use a simulation to demonstrate a significant reduction in the growth rate of outpatient waiting time resulting from using the proposed method and investigate the sensitivity of results to several model assumptions.
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