This paper studies a multi-criteria optimization problem which appears in the context of booking chemotherapy appointments. The main feature of the model under study is the requirement to book for each patient multiple appointments which should follow a pre-speci ed multi-day pattern. Each appointment involves several nurse activities which should also follow a pre-speci ed intra-day pattern. T...

During a severe financial crisis, it is a priority to use scientific evidence to identify factors that enable therapeutic compliance by patients. This study aimed to evaluate a possible association between the number of patients who attended a medical appointment and had medicine prescribed and the number of these same patients who purchased the prescribed medicine and whether the level of reim...

Background Policies assigning low-priority patients treatment delays for care, in order to make room for patients of higher priority arriving later, are common in secondary healthcare services today. Alternatively, each new patient could be granted the first available appointment. We aimed to investigate whether prioritisation can be part of the reason why waiting times for care are often...

Online resource allocation problems are difficult because the operator must make irrevocable decisions rapidly and with limited (or nonexistent) information on future requests. We propose a mathematical-programming-based framework that takes into account all the available forecasts and the limited computational time. We combine Benders decomposition, which allows us to measure the expected futu...

We present the case of an ambulatory clinic in which an operational review was conducted to identify opportunities for efficiency in appointment scheduling and capacity allocation. We required process data to compare that which was planned to that which actually happened and to develop advanced analytical models. Similar to other health care studies, these data proved to be limited or non-exist...

practice appointment rates could have a significant impact on national health care costs and services offered by doctors. in this respect a study was designed to determine the relationship between practice appointments and possible predictors in high-risk asthmatics. an observational retrospective analysis of the predictors for the practice appointments in asthmatic patients with at least one h...

introduction: advantages of endodontic treatments over tooth extraction have increased the demands for these treatments. success rate of these treatments is generally lower than the primary root canal therapies. recently, single visit treatments have gained more popularity. but, the influence of completing retreatment in a single appointment on success of the treatment is still a controversy. t...

OBJECTIVES To determine the impact on breastfeeding sustained beyond two months of the "Seventeen Steps" breastfeeding maintenance program consisting of seventeen strategies used to promote, support and protect breastfeeding and implemented for ten months at a medical center. METHODS Nonrandomized clinical trial, involving 147 children born between 01/01/99 and 31/12/2001, who had attended th...