A Stochastic programming approach for multi-appointment outpatient scheduling in cardiology

This research tackles the problem of multi-appointment scheduling in a healthcare environment with limited resources. Considering elective outpatient procedures in the cardiology department of a large medical center, where patients have to visit the hospital on multiple occasions to go through the required tests and treatments, a model is designed and developed towards optimizing the allocation of the available resources to the patients. The objective is to minimize the weighted combination of the number of visits that the patients have to make to the hospital until the completion of the program they are going through and the time that the outpatients spend in the hospital while waiting in between appointments. Constraints taken into account include the availability of the patients and the required resources, the sequencing of the procedures, and the recovery time that should be provided to patients between procedures. Stochastic programming techniques are applied to optimize the scheduling decisions over time.