Publication:
Appointment requests from multiple channels: characterizing optimal set of appointment days to offer with patient preferences

dc.contributor.coauthorTunçalp F.
dc.contributor.departmentDepartment of Industrial Engineering
dc.contributor.kuauthorÖrmeci, Lerzan
dc.contributor.schoolcollegeinstituteCollege of Engineering
dc.date.accessioned2025-03-06T21:00:33Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.description.abstractWe consider the appointment scheduling for a physician in a healthcare facility. Patients, of two types differentiated by their revenues and day preferences, contact the facility through either a call center to be scheduled immediately or a website to be scheduled the following morning. The facility aims to maximize the long-run average revenue, while ensuring that a certain service level is satisfied for patients generating lower revenue. The facility has two decisions: offering a set of appointment days and choosing the patient type to prioritize while contacting the website patients. Model 1 is a periodic Markov Decision Process (MDP) model without the service-level constraint. We establish certain structural properties of Model 1, while providing sufficient conditions for the existence of a preferred patient type and for the nonoptimality of the commonly used offer-all policy. We also demonstrate the importance of patient preference in determining the preferred type. Model 2 is the constrained MDP model that accommodates the service-level constraint and has an optimal randomized policy with a special structure. This allows developing an efficient method to identify a well-performing policy. We illustrate the performance of this policy through numerical experiments, for systems with and without no-shows.
dc.description.indexedbyScopus
dc.description.publisherscopeInternational
dc.description.sponsoredbyTubitakEuN/A
dc.identifier.doi10.1287/stsy.2022.0029
dc.identifier.issn1946-5238
dc.identifier.issue3
dc.identifier.quartileN/A
dc.identifier.scopus2-s2.0-85205021741
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1287/stsy.2022.0029
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/27919
dc.identifier.volume14
dc.keywordsAppointment scheduling
dc.keywordsPeriodic Markov Decision Process with constraint
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherINFORMS Inst.for Operations Res.and the Management Sciences
dc.relation.ispartofStochastic Systems
dc.subjectIndustrial Engineering
dc.titleAppointment requests from multiple channels: characterizing optimal set of appointment days to offer with patient preferences
dc.typeJournal Article
dspace.entity.typePublication
local.contributor.kuauthorÖrmeci, Lerzan
local.publication.orgunit1College of Engineering
local.publication.orgunit2Department of Industrial Engineering
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relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication.latestForDiscoveryd6d00f52-d22d-4653-99e7-863efcd47b4a
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