Business Analytics Seminar

Balancing appointments and walk-ins in healthcare

Nikky Kortbeek, University of Twente

24th Feb 2012  11:00 am - Room 498, Merewether Building

Outpatient clinics and diagnostic testing facilities traditionally provide patients with individual appointments to balance workload. Disadvantages however, include patients needing to revisit the hospital, an involved planning process and potentially long access times. In this talk I discuss a study in which we explore the viability of walk-in based policies. We introduce a stochastic method that finds the mixed strategy that balances the benefits and drawbacks of pure appointment and walk-in policies.