Adaptive Patient Appointment Scheduling System (APASS) for DoD Medical Facilities

Current scheduling methods fail to address the dynamic nature of the Military Health System environment. What is needed is an approach to scheduling that can accommodate the dynamic changes in the health environment, an approach that provides not just scheduling but also rescheduling, to ensure that available human resources and facilities are used efficiently and to the maximum benefit of the patients served by the system. We propose an Adaptive Patient Appointment Scheduling System (APASS) for DoD Medical Facilities that monitors a schedule in real-time to detect deviations or changes in resource availability that prevent fulfillment of the schedule. It uses dynamic rescheduling to correct those deviations while preserving the appointments and objectives that must be satisfied by the schedule. The proposed system relies on schedule monitoring to detect disruptions in the schedule; impact assessment to determine the effects of schedule disruptions and prevent them from spiraling into larger problems; and rescheduling to accommodate detected disruptions as well as new objectives (e.g. new appointments) and minimize their impact. We see considerable potential for this approach in enhancing management of the Military Health System and for use in a variety of commercial scheduling applications.