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Outpatient capacity allocation considering adding capacity to match high patient demand

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Abstract

This paper focuses on an outpatient capacity allocation problem where the patient demand is quite higher than the supply. We study an adding capacity policy to mitigate the mismatch between supply and demand. Under this policy, the doctor is allowed to add capacity if all regular capacity have been booked. A capacity allocation model is formulated for both possible no-show routine patients and all show-up same-day patients. The purpose is to determine the number of capacity can be added and how to allocate regular capacity among routine patients and same-day patients, towards maximizing the expected profit, which is composed of the expected income minus the cost of weighted expected doctor’s overload work caused by the adding capacity policy and the cost of rejecting patients. To achieve the aims, we prove the expected profit monotonously decreases when the number of additional capacity exceeds a threshold, and present a two-tier enumeration search algorithm to find the global optimal solution based on the proof. Numerical results indicate that the proposed policy performs well under different levels of demand higher than supply. The optimal number of the additional capacity is hardly affected by varying total expected patient demand. Additionally, under the change of no-show rate, the number of regular capacity allocated to routine patients becomes more stable, compared with the optimal scheme without considering adding capacity policy.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71420107028, in part by Hong Kong Research Grant Council under Grant T32-102/14-N and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 71501027.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Systems Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China

    Bowen Jiang

  2. College of Management Science and Engineering, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian, 116025, China

    Jiafu Tang & Chongjun Yan

Authors
  1. Bowen Jiang
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  2. Jiafu Tang
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  3. Chongjun Yan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jiafu Tang.

Additional information

Bowen Jiang is a PhD student in the Institute of Systems Engineering at Northeastern University, Shenyang. His research interests are in the areas of outpatient appointment management.

Jiafu Tang is a ChangJiang Scholarship Chair Professor. He is the Head of College of Management Science and Engineering at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian. His research interests are in the areas of production and operations optimization in manufacturing systems and service systems, and operation planning in health care service.

Chongjun Yan is a lecturer in the College of Management Science and Engineering at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian. His research interests are in the areas of operation planning in health care service.

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Jiang, B., Tang, J. & Yan, C. Outpatient capacity allocation considering adding capacity to match high patient demand. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 26, 487–516 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-017-5350-8

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