Scheduling Hemodialysis Patients with Patient Preferences

Nowadays, outpatient providers are struggling to reduce the current costs and improve the service quality. A part of the outpatient service provider is a hemodialysis department with expensive supplies and equipment. Therefore, in the present paper, the scheduling of hemodialysis patients with their preferences has been studied. The aim of scheduling hemodialysis patients in this study is to minimize the normalized weighted sum of deviations from the  patients' preferences and the  total completion time. It should be noted that the patient's preferences include beds, treatment combination of days and their turn. To solve the problem, two mathematical models have been presented. Performence of the models in solving the real data of the hemodyalisis department of Imam Khomeini Hospital, in Kermanshah, was investigated. The results showed the efficiency of the proposed models in considering the preferences of patients;  however, these preferences in the hospital schedule were considered in few cases, as far as it was possible.  So, these preferences has no priority in the hospital schedule. In addition to considering the patients’ preferences, the solution of models reduced the total completion time of the pationts treatment. Also, one of the proposed models in this papercould  optimally solve the instances three times larger than the hospital cases