Non-block scheduling with priority for radiotherapy treatments

In this paper, a quite challenging operational problem within health care delivery has been considered: the optimal management of patients waiting for radiotherapy treatments. Long waiting times for radiotherapy treatments of several cancers are largely documented all over the world. This problem is mainly due to an imbalance between supply and demand of radiotherapy services, which negatively affects the effectiveness and the efficiency of the health care delivered. Within this context, the paper presents an innovative solution approach for effectively scheduling a set of patients waiting to start the radiotherapy plan. The proposed approach is based on a well tailored integer linear optimization program, modelling a non-block scheduling strategy, with the aim to minimize the mean waiting time or maximize the number of new scheduled patients. The model has been tested and evaluated by carrying out some numerical experiments on suitable use-case scenarios, and the obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed approach.