Appointment Scheduling with Overbooking to Mitigate Productivity Loss from No-shows

The challenge of balancing the interests of patients with those of healthcare providers is increased when patients fail to show up for scheduled appointments. Overbooking appointments mitigates the lost productivity caused by no-shows but increases patient wait time and provider overtime. In this paper, simulation analysis is used to develop and test the performance of scheduling rules that are designed specifically to accommodate excess overbooked appointments. Our analysis provides new insights into rules that perform well to increase provider productivity while balancing the increased waiting time and overtime costs of overbooked schedules.