Semi-online patient scheduling in pathology laboratories

Nowadays, effective scheduling of patients in clinics, laboratories, and emergency rooms is becoming increasingly important. Hospitals are required to maximize the level of patient satisfaction, while they are faced with lack of space and facilities. An effective scheduling of patients in existing conditions is vital for improving healthcare delivery. The shorter waiting time of patients improves healthcare service quality and efficiency. Focusing on real settings, this paper addresses a semi-online patient scheduling problem in a pathology laboratory located in Tehran, Iran, as a case study.

Due to partial precedence constraints of laboratory tests, the problem is formulated as a semi-online hybrid shop scheduling problem and a mixed integer linear programming model is proposed. A genetic algorithm (GA) is developed for solving the problem and response surface methodology is used for setting GA parameters. A lower bound is also calculated for the problem, and several experiments are conducted to estimate the validity of the proposed algorithm.

Based on the empirical data collected from the pathology laboratory, comparison between the current condition of the laboratory and the results obtained by the proposed approach is performed through simulation experiments. The results indicate that the proposed approach can significantly reduce waiting time of the patients and improve operations efficiency.

The proposed approach has been successfully applied to scheduling patients in a pathology laboratory considering the real-world settings including precedence constraints of tests, constraint on the number of sites or operators for taking tests (i.e. multi-machine problem), and semi-online nature of the problem.