On Performance of Prioritized Appointment Scheduling for Healthcare

Designing the appointment scheduling is a challenging task for the development of healthcare system. The efficient solution approach can provide high quality of healthcare service between care provides (CP)s and care receivers (CR)s. In this paper, we consider the healthcare system with the heterogeneous CRs in terms of urgent and routine CRs. Our suggested model assumes that the system gives the service priority to the urgent CRs by allowing them to interrupt the ongoing routine appointments. An appointment handoff scheme is suggested for the interrupted routine appointments, and thus the routine CRs can attempt to re-establish the appointment scheduling with other available CPs. With these considerations, we study the scheduling performance of the system by using the Markov chains based modolling approach. The numerical analysis is reported and the simulation experiment is conducted to validate the numerical results. Copyright c © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.