Abstract

In recent years, healthcare management has become fertile ground for the scheduling theory community. In addition to an extensive academic literature on this subject, there has also been a proliferation of healthcare scheduling software companies in the marketplace. Typical scheduling systems use rule-based analytics that give schedulers advisory information from programmable heuristics such as the Bailey-Welch rule cite{B,BW}, which recommends overbooking early in the day to fill-in potential no-shows later on. We propose a dynamic programming problem formulation to the scheduling problem that maximizes revenue. We formulate the problem and discuss the effectiveness of 3 different algorithms that solve the problem. We find that the 3rd algorithm, which has smallest amount of nodes in the decision tree, has an upper bound given by the Bell numbers. We then present an alternative problem formulation that includes stochastic appointment lengths and no shows.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Mathematics

Rights

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