Influence of Appointment Times on Interday Scheduling

In primary care mainly two types of patient requests occur: walk-ins without an appointment and patients with a prescheduled appointment. The number and position of such prescheduled appointments influence waiting times for patients, capacity for treatment and the utilization of physicians. An integer linear model is developed, where the minimum number of appointments prescheduled for a weekly profile is determined. Since the number of patient requests differs significantly between seasons, weekdays and daytime, efficient appointment scheduling has to take different scenarios into account. Using an intensive monte-carlo simulation, we compare appointment strategies with respect to their performance for different scenarios.