A pull-strategy for the appointment scheduling of surgical patients in a hospital-integrated facility

Safa Chabouh; Sondes Hammami; Eric Marcon; Hanen Bouchriha

doi:10.1080/20476965.2021.1908851

A pull-strategy for the appointment scheduling of surgical patients in a hospital-integrated facility

Health Syst (Basingstoke). 2021 Apr 23;11(3):172-188. doi: 10.1080/20476965.2021.1908851. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Safa Chabouh¹, Sondes Hammami^{1

2}, Eric Marcon³, Hanen Bouchriha¹

Affiliations

¹ Université de Tunis El Manar, Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Tunis, LR11ES20 Laboratoire d'Analyse, de Conception et de Commande des Systèmes, 1002, Tunis, Tunisia.
² Université De Carthage, Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs De Carthage, 2035, Tunis, Tunisia.
³ Université De Lyon INSA-LYON, Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne, DISP, EA 4570, Villeurbanne, France.

Abstract

This paper addresses the daily appointment scheduling (AS) of patients in a hospital-integrated facility where outpatients and inpatients are treated simultaneously and share critical resources. We propose a lean approach based on the pull-strategy "Constant Work in Process" (ConWIP) to develop robust and easy-to-implement AS rules. Our objective is to reduce patients' waiting time and maximise the use rate of resources while considering the global surgical process and stochastic service times. The AS rules based on ConWIP are evaluated using a Discrete-Event-Simulation model. Numerical experiments based on a real-life case study are carried out to assess the proposed appointment rules' performance and compare them to AS rules developed in the literature. The results highlight the robustness of our approach and demonstrate its usefulness in practice.

Keywords: Operations management in healthcare; appointment scheduling; constant-work-in-process (ConWIP); discrete-event simulation; hospital-integrated facility.