Using simulation to examine appointment overbooking schemes for a medical imaging center

In this paper, we present an appointment scheduling problem faced by a medical imaging center in a major hospital in Macau. We developed an empirically calibrated simulation model to represent the appointment and medical diagnosis procedure as a multi-server queuing network with multiple patient classes. Four appointment overbooking schemes are proposed to compensate for patient no-shows and unpunctuality. The focus of this study is to integrate overbooking schemes with existing appointment rules to improve the operational efficiency of the center. Simulation results show that our proposed overbooking schemes significantly enhance the performance of the center. Compared with the current practice, the best performing overbooking scheme reduces the overtime by 58.32% and the idle time by 23.65%, increases the number of patients served by 15.9%, while still ensuring that patient waiting times remain acceptable.