A study of appointment system with integrated examination process

• Main Authors: Shin-Shin Wang, 王芯芯
• Other Authors: Jy-Hsin Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/71439741920627588432

碩士 === 華梵大學 === 工業管理學系碩士班 === 88 === Under increasing demand for better medical service quality, the topic about reducing patient waiting time and number of journey to hospital has become more and more important. This research explored the possibility of using an integrated examination appointment system that controls the arrival of patients and arranges the examination routes to decrease the computational burden of traditional appointment system. The basic concept is first let patients only make appointment for the first examination process and to then follow the first come first serve (FCFS) rule at those succeeding processes. The research developed different heuristic algorithms that allocate the patients to the treatment sessions. Based on the Taguchi experimental design, the research explored the effect caused by the controllable factors (number of appointments, inter-arrival time between appointments, examination routing, and facility’s process sequence) and uncontrollable factors (coefficient of variation of service time, the length of service time) on facility utilization, mean waiting time etc., through simulation. The results indicate that some of the controllable factors have significant influence to the performance, but those uncontrollable factors play a more important role, thus to improve the system performance, the management should first try to reduce the environmental variations and next to use a better appointment allocation scheme.