多医生环境考虑患者爽约的门诊预约决策方法

针对多个医生医疗环境下具有提前预约和当天预约两类预约患者的门诊预约问题,在考虑提前预约患者可能存在爽约行为的情形下,提出了一种用于决定是否接受提前预约患者的预约请求的门诊预约决策方法.文中首先以医院的期望收益最大作为决策目标,建立了患者存在爽约行为的医疗预约问题的马尔可夫过程模型;然后基于所建立模型的特征,证明了对于任意的提前预约时段,均存在对应于每个医生的提前预约患者的最优预约数量的上界,且此上界随着患者爽约概率的增加而增加,随着预约所有医生的患者总数的增加而减小;进一步地,给出了该门诊预约问题的一种预约决策方法以及确定该方法的精确算法;最后,通过数值实验说明了本文所提出的决策方法的适用性和有效性.

A decision-making method for outpatient appointment with multiple doctors considering no-shows

In this paper, the outpatient appointment problem which includes appointments in advance and in same-day with multiple physicians is considered. Considering the situation that patients who make appointments in advance may not show up for their appointments (i.e., no-shows), a decision-making method is presented to determine whether the requests of patients who make appointments in advance should be accepted. For maximizing the expected revenue of clinic, the Markov process model considering no-shows is firstly constructed. Then, based on the characteristics of the model, we prove that there exists the upper bound of the optimal number of patients who make appointments in advance for each physician. The upper bound increases with the increase of no-show probability and decreases with the increase of the total number of patients booked in advance. Further, the decision-making method and algorithm of solving the method are given. Finally, a numerical test is given to illustrate the practicality and effectiveness of the decision-making method.