Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Patient and Resource Scheduling of Multi-Step Medical Procedures in Nuclear Medicine

The rise in demand for specialized medical services in the U.S. has been recognized as one of the contributors to increased health care costs. Nuclear medicine is a specialized service that uses relatively new technologies and radiopharmaceuticals with a short half-life for diagnosis and treatment of diseases. Nuclear medicine procedures are multi-step and have to be performed under restrictive time constraints. Consequently, managing patients in nuclear medicine clinics is a challenging problem that has received little research attention. In this paper, we derive algorithms for scheduling nuclear medicine patients and resources. We validate our algorithms using simulation of an actual nuclear medicine clinic based on historical data and compare the performance of our algorithms with the methods currently used in the clinic. The results we obtain provide useful insights into managing patients and resources in nuclear medicine clinics. For example, results show that patient throughput can be increased when some clinic resources are reserved to exclusively serve specific procedures on those days when higher demand is expected.

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