Do Today’s Work Today: Don’t Send Patients Away! : an appointment scheduling algorithm that can deal with walk-in

Traditionally diagnostic facilities schedule appointments for all patients that require an examination. Allowing patients to walk in without an appointment reduces access times. It also creates the possibility to combine outpatient consultations and diagnostic examinations on one day, which speeds up the diagnostic process. Since not all patients can walk in, our goal is to develop an algorithm that generates appointment schedules with which both patients with an appointment and walk-in patients can be served. The generated schedule should prescribe the number of appointments to schedule per day and the moment on the day to schedule these appointments. We maximize the fraction of walk-in patients that can be served on the day of their arrival, while satisfying an access time service level norm for patients with an appointment. We conducted our research at the Academic Medical Centre (AMC), a large academic hospital in Amsterdam.