An Integer Programming Formulation for Outpatient Scheduling with Patient Preference

Patients' satisfaction while receiving medical service is affected by whether or not their preferences can be met, including time and physician preference. Due to scarcity of medical resource in China, efficient use of available resources is urgently required. To guarantee the utilization ratio, the scheduling decisions are made after all booking information is received. Two integer models with different objectives are formulated separately, maximizing the degree of satisfaction and revenue. The optimal value of the two models can be considered as the bound of corresponding objectives. However, it is improper to implement any of the extreme policies. Because revenue is a key element to keep the hospital running and satisfaction degree is related to the hospital's reputation, neither the revenue nor the satisfaction can be missed. Therefore, hospitals should make a balance. An integrated model is developed to find out the tradeoff between the two objectives. The whole degree of mismatching that is related to patient satisfaction and other separate mismatching degree are considered. Through a computational study, it is concluded that based on the proposed model hospitals can make their decisions according to service requirement.