Scheduling to Patients' Appointment Queue with Endogenous No-Shows

Abstract

Appointment scheduling has been considered widely in healthcare management. Multi-source of variability makes it challenging to determine the optimal appointment schedules. It is assumed that the probability that a patient behaves not show up is nondecreasing with respect to the system's backlog. An optimal schedule of appointment under queuing system with state dependent no-show rate is considered. Furthermore, we compare the impact of this kind of no-show behavior on the optimal schedule. We conclude that although the expected waiting time for each patient under state dependent no-show scenario is not much higher than the scenario when all patients show up, the state dependent no-show behavior will significant increases the overall cost.