Outpatient Scheduling in Highly Constrained Environments: A Literature Review

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research on scheduling in outpatient services. An effective scheduling system has the goal of matching demand with capacity so that resources are better utilized, especially in highly constrained environments. This paper presents a general problem formulation and modeling considerations. It also provides taxonomy of methodologies used in the literature. The current literature fails to develop general guidelines that can be applied to design outpatient scheduling systems. Therefore, we identify future research directions that provide opportunities to expand the existing knowledge and close the gap between theory and practice. Our paper presents a literature review about four primary aspects: allocation of outpatient resources (R), outpatient appointment model (A), patient preferences (P), and research methodology for outpatient scheduling (M) under highly constrained environments. The models presented are focused on three outpatient appointment models (i.e., the traditional model, carve-out model, and advanced access model).

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