Simulating and Selecting the best Appointment System of an Outpatient Department

ISBN: 978-981-08-8407-9

Authors: Mahmoud Alrefaei, Alaa Abu Nahiah, Abeer Abu-Lebda and Danya Khayal

Abstract:

In this paper, we model and compare several appointment systems for outpatient department in a healthcare system. The objective is to design an appointment system that minimizes the average waiting time per patient and at the sametime uses the resources effectively by maximizing the doctor utilization. The problem is modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem. We propose a raking and selection procedures to construct a Pareto set that consists of nondominated systems with a predetermined level of confidence. The procedure is implemented on an outpatient clinic at Doha Hospital Clinics by modeling and simulating six appointment systems using ARENA and compares them to select the best ones.

Keywords: Outpatient Department, Appointment Systems, Multi-Objective Optimization, Ranking and Selection