Abstract
This study investigates demand and capacity strategies for managing clinic variability. These include (i) same-day scheduling to control random walk-ins, (ii) no-show intervention, where the clinic calls advance-booked patients a day before to identify and release cancelled slots to same-day patients, and (iii) adjustments to daily number of appointments for advance-booked patients to match seasonal variations in same-day demand. These strategies are tested over the individual-block/fixed-interval (IBFI) and the Dome appointment rules. Our results show that choosing the appropriate refinements in the order of appointment rules, same-day scheduling, no-show intervention, and capacity adjustment provides maximum improvement. The total cost benefit of demand strategies (i) and (ii) is 7 to 21%, whereas the benefit of capacity strategy (iii) is as high as 6%. Our study affirms the universality of the Dome rule to perform well when combined with the demand and capacity strategies across different environments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 An online tool for the Dome rule can be reached at http://www.appointmentschedulingtool.com/.
2 Variation or standard deviation of seasonal demand is a product of the seasonal Cv and probability of same-day patients PS.