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A Two-stage Stochastic Programming Model for Outpatient Appointment Scheduling

Healthcare providers are facing increasing pressure to improve efficiency for healthcare delivery. Efficient appointment scheduling can improve retention and quality of healthcare services. This paper studies outpatient appointment scheduling as a two-stage stochastic optimization problem with a multi-server model. The first stage optimizes doctor planning according to capacity constraints and patient requests, based on which the second stage optimizes patient planning by taking into account uncertain service durations. Numerical experiments have been conducted and shown that the proposed two-stage stochastic programming model can reduce hospital operating costs while improving patient satisfaction.