question

I'm very much interested in working through this appointment scheduling problem with you. It sounds very interesting. It'd sure be nice if we could come up with a small example model to work through as we test out our assumptions and ideas for implementation.

It sounds like the basic functionality we need is the ability to dynamically assign a patient to a future appointment slot based on 1) a minimum required delay time between the current time and a future appointment time, 2) what staff member the patient needs to see, 3) first available appointment slot after the required minimum delay period.

I know that some modelers have chosen to account for multiple visits by the same patient by simply scheduling separate patient arrivals for the return visit, and then using sepaate PCI assignments for New Patients versus Return Patients. However, I realize there are times when this sort of approach would be less than ideal, so let's try to solve it more realistically!

In modeling this, we need to decide whether we would rather stage patients in a queue while waiting for their return visit, or destroy the patient and recreate a new patient at a specified time dynamically during the simulation. Both are possible, and both have their advantages and disadvantages.

To start with, let's try to get a sample model built that has all the aspects we need in it. How do you want to kick off this model with it's initial flow of patients? Do you want to have all "New Patients" arrive in the model via one of the standard arrival tables available on the Patient Arrivals object such as the Appointment Table or the Custom Arrivals table? You mentioned a certain number of same-day access (walk-ins) patients. Could these also be scheduled with one of the standard arrival tables? We could then either stage those patients who need a return visit, or let them leave the model and then we auto-generate a new patient at the scheduled time for the return visit.

If we use the standard arrival tables to generate patients, then we will need to populate a master appointment schedule that we can keep track of in a Global Table within the model. This is so that we can accurately search for an available appointment slot when scheduling a return visit for return patient. I'm wondering whether we should have one master schedule for the whole clinic, or whether we should have separate appointment logs for each of the nurse practitioners. Any ideas? The closer it matches what they have in real-life, the better. Because I can devise a scheme for creating all our patient arrivals during the course of a simulation, based on what's filled out in these appointment schedule(s), we could do away with any of the standard arrivals tables in our model, but let's not begin that way. How about you try building a simple model with representative patient arrivals for "Scheduled New Patients" and "Walk-in New Patients" using the standard arrival tables and let's go from there. I'd also like you to create an Excel spreadsheet or similar that can represent what we might want our Patient Appointment Log or Logs to look like. I'm assuming the spreadsheet would include some of the following columns: AppointmentType, AppointmentDateTime, EstimatedAppointmentDuration, AssignedNurse.