Beyond Callbacks: A Simple and Easily Implementable Solution for Clinic Appointment Scheduling Outpatient clinics face a difficult scheduling problem: Patient requests arrive unpredictably, whereas cancellations and no-shows make future demand uncertain. A longer scheduling window gives clinics more flexibility to absorb fluctuations in arrivals, but it also increases the risk of cancellations and no-shows. This paper develops a new policy, called the scheduling diagram, that explicitly captures this tradeoff in general settings. The scheduling diagram policy is a simple rule that specifies in advance the sequence of appointment slots to be filled within the booking window. It is easy to implement, allowing staff to assign appointments immediately as patients arrive. It is also easy to compute because it is constructed by ranking the marginal values of scalar functions and does not require repeated reoptimization. The paper further shows that a hybrid approach, using a two-day schedule for a short window and an improved probabilistic policy a longer window, achieves strong and stable performance across a wide range of scenarios. The key message is that a simple interpretable scheduling diagram policy can be both practical and highly effective in managing uncertain patient flows.
Chen et al. (Mon,) studied this question.