Online Appointment Scheduling for a Nuclear Medicine Department in a Chinese Hospital

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 scientifc 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 ofine nonlinear integer programming model which considers multiresources allocation, the time window constraints imposed by shortlived radiopharmaceuticals, and the stochastic nature of the patient requests when scheduling patients. A series of experiments are conducted to show the efectiveness of the proposed strategy based on data provided by the WCH. Te results show that the examination amount increases by 29.76% compared with the current one with a signifcant 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.