Time: May 19, 2009, 2:00PM-3:30PM

Location: Room 510, Shunde Building

Speaker: Dr. Bo Zeng, Dept. of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, University of South Florida

Title: Will Clinic Overbooking Always Be Effective?

Abstract:

The problem of patient no-shows poses a huge challenge for clinic operations in USA. In many cases, the no-show rate could be more than 40% which leads to a great financial lose for clinics.  Given such a situation, overbooking has been proposed and implemented in many clinics to stabilize their revenues.  However, the most obvious disadvantage of overbooking is the prolonged office waiting times.  As a result, patients have less satisfaction that discourages them to keep their future appointments.   To develop management insights as well as provide analytical results on clinic overbooking, we first build a game theoretical model that considers patient responses towards office 

waiting time. We derive the conditions under which there exists the unique Nash Equilibrium for both deterministic service as well as exponential service time. We further consider the effect of overbooking on reducing appointment lead-time that improves patient show-up rate using Green and Savin’s queuing model.  We develop a recursive procedure to derive the results for steady states and present a set of computational results comparing patient no-shows and clinic revenues. Overall, our research quantitatively analyzes the interaction between clinics and patients and gives a systematic study on clinic overbooking.

*Biosketch of Dr. Bo Zeng*

Dr. Bo Zeng is an assistant professor in the department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at University of South Florida.  His research interest includes cutting plane algorithms for deterministic and stochastic discrete optimization problems and application of operations research in healthcare delivery engineering.  Before joining USF, he was a postdoc researcher in the School of Biomedical Engineering at Purdue University, working on outpatient and chemotherapy patient scheduling issues. His also obtained his Ph.D. from the school of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. His dissertation was concentrated on developing strong lifted cutting planes from multiple constraints for general mixed integer programming problems.