In cancer care, the planning of multiple outpatient appointments with various specialists on a single day is becoming common practice. However, this requires intensive collaboration between specialists, to prevent excessive waiting times and overtime. CHOIR researchers Gréanne Leeftink and Erwin Hans, together with Ingrid Vliegen (TU/e), analyzed the planning and scheduling of such outpatient clinics, in which patients require multiple appointments to hear about their treatment options, and showed the working of their approach in a case study in UMC Utrecht. The results show that a tradeoff between patient waiting time, provider idle time, and overtime has to be made, according to the clinic’s preferences.
The full text of the paper can be found here:
