Real-time doctor-patient assignment in a telemedicine system

The aim of this paper is to address and overcome the limitation in number of doctors by assigning patients efficiently in Telemedicine System. In this paper, we present mathematical formulation and an algorithm to address the problem of effective and resourceful mapping between patients and doctors for online Telemedicine System so that overall patient wait time can be minimized. Our proposed algorithm is based on providing efficient allocation of patients to doctors considering two primary factors i.e. patient handling time and workload (queue size) of doctor. We compare our algorithm with baseline algorithm (Round Robin) and calculate percentile average difference of the mean average time of both with constraints of limited, moderate and maximum availability of resources under the observation in variation of patient handling time. Our simulation based evaluation shows increase in efficiency from 0.0% in worst case to 110.84% in best case when compared with Round Robin. Therefore our proposed algorithm can help to improve doctor´s efficiency and minimize patient wait time. The improvement in the assigning patients to doctors in efficient way yields to effective resource utilization of scarce health resources.