Scheduling outpatients in hospital examination departments

Outpatients scheduling problem in examination departments allocates hospital equipments to patients and decides on the time to perform examination. This task plays an important role in utilizing the limited hospital equipments efficiently while ensuring quality of service for patients. First, the history examinations data of the hospital is analyzed, and the bottleneck department is defined. Then, some dispatching rules for the outpatient examination are developed to minimize total waiting time subject to minimum idle-time of the equipments in bottleneck department. Computational experiments are performed on the real data collected from Shanghai Ninth People Hospital, and the results show that it is efficient to reduce the waiting time of the outpatients.