Using alternative fuel vehicles is one of the ways to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels which have many negative environmental effects. An alternative fuel vehicle needs special planning for its refueling operations because of some reasons, e.g. limited number of refueling stations, uncertain refueling queue times in the stations, variable alternative fuel prices among the stations, etc. I...

www.aafp.org / fpm ■ F A M I L Y P R A C T I C E M A N A G E M E N T ■ 39 IL LU ST R A TI O N B Y T IM L EE Our current health care system is plagued by long waiting times and delays in care. These waits and delays dissatisfy patients, medical staff and physicians, while increasing health care costs, reducing potential income and adversely affecting clinical outcomes. Patients experience long w...

Waiting times are a reality in Canada’s publicly financed single-payer healthcare system. While there are ample data about waiting times for specialized investigations and procedures, few data exist about waiting times to see family physicians, and determinants of this wait. We analyzed data from a survey of 731 family physicians in southwestern Ontario to understand physicianand practice-level...

Background Liver transplantation (LT) is an important treatment for acute liver failure and end-stage liver disease. In 2002, the model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score was incorporated to prioritize patients awaiting LT. Although there is data on how the MELD score affects waiting times, there is a paucity of literature regarding other components. We aimed to evaluate the factors affec...

Long waiting times for non-emergency services are a feature of several publicly-funded health systems. A key policy concern is that long waiting times may worsen health outcomes: when patients receive treatment, their health condition may have deteriorated and health gains reduced. This study investigates whether patients in need of coronary bypass with longer waiting times are associated with ...

The ever-increasing demands for surgeries and the limited resources force hospitals to have efficient management of resources, especially the expensive ones like operating rooms (ORs). Scheduling surgeries including sequencing them, assigning resources to them and determining their start times is a complicated task for hospital managers. Surgery referrals usually include elective surgeries that...

Moving particles that rest along their trajectory lead to time-fractional diffusion equations for the scaling limit distributions. For power law waiting times with infinite mean, the equation contains a fractional time derivative of order between 0 and 1. For finite mean waiting times, the most revealing approach is to employ two time scales, one for the mean and another for deviations from the...

We study a polling model where we want to achieve a balance between the fairness of the waiting times and the efficiency of the system. For this purpose, we introduce the κ-gated service discipline. It is a hybrid of the classical gated and exhausted disciplines, and consists of using κi gated service phases at queue i before the server switches to the next queue. We derive the distributions an...

BACKGROUND There is an ongoing debate in Germany about the assumption that patients with private health insurance (PHI) benefit from better access to medical care, including shorter waiting times (Lüngen et al. 2008), compared to patients with statutory health insurance (SHI). PROBLEM Existing analyses of the determinants for waiting times in Germany are a) based on patient self-reports and b...

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the mean waiting time for a polling system with general service order sequence and nonexhaustive service discipline. We obtain an expression for the mean waiting time in terms of a so-called residual cycle time and derive a pseudoconservation law (PCL) to help improve the accuracy of estimations of the mean waiting time. By multiplying the estimations of...