Online Appointment Scheduling for a Nuclear Medicine Department in a Chinese Hospital. (11th April 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Xiao, Qian; Luo, Li; Zhao, Shu-zhen; Ran, Xiao-bin; Feng, Ya-bing
• Other Names: Zhao Yuhai Academic Editor.
• Is Part Of: Computational and mathematical methods in medicine. Volume 2018(2018)
• Publication Date: 2018-04-11
• Subjects: Medicine -- Computer simulation -- Periodicals; Medicine -- Mathematical models -- Periodicals; 610.11
• DOI: 10.1155/2018/5148215
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1748-670X

Abstract

Abstract : Nuclear medicine, a subspecialty of radiology, plays an important role in proper diagnosis and timely treatment. Multiple resources, especially short-lived radiopharmaceuticals involved in the process of nuclear medical examination, constitute a unique problem in appointment scheduling. Aiming at achieving scientific and reasonable appointment scheduling in the West China Hospital (WCH), a typical class A tertiary hospital in China, we developed an online appointment scheduling algorithm based on an offline nonlinear integer programming model which considers multiresources allocation, the time window constraints imposed by short-lived radiopharmaceuticals, and the stochastic nature of the patient requests when scheduling patients. A series of experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy based on data provided by the WCH. The results show that the examination amount increases by 29.76% compared with the current one with a significant increase in the resource utilization and timely rate. Besides, it also has a high stability for stochastic factors and bears the advantage of convenient and economic operation.