Patients assignment for an oncology outpatient unit

This paper considers an oncology ambulatory care unit (ACU) in a cancer center. Recently, the ACU we consider in this paper is facing increasing demand for oncologic care and increasingly sophisticated care technologies. The ACU is often over-capacitated leading to high overtime and long patient waiting times. This paper proposes a method for optimizing patients´ assignment in order to best smooth the bed utilization, also called bedload, while taking into account constraints such as the care protocols. A simulation model is then proposed to assess the effectiveness of the proposed patient assignment policy. Numerical experiments based data collected from the field show the capability of the proposed method to smooth the bedload.