Design and comparison of scheduling strategy for teleconsultation

BACKGROUND: Telemedicine is playing an increasingly more important role in disease diagnosis and treatment. The market of telemedicine application is continuously promoted, thus bringing some issues on telemedicine operations management. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to compare the teleconsultation scheduling performance of newly designed proactive strategy and existing static strategy and explore the decision-making under different conditions. METHODS: We developed a discrete-event simulation model based on practical investigation to describe the existing static scheduling strategy of teleconsultation. The static strategy model was verified by comparing it with the historical data. Then a new proactive strategy was proposed, whose average waiting time, variance of waiting time and completed numbers were compared with the static strategy. RESULTS: The analysis indicated that the proactive strategy performed better than static under the current resource allocation. Furthermore, we explored the impact on the system of both strategies varying arrival rate and experts' shift time. CONCLUSIONS: Under different shift times and arrival rates, the managers of telemedicine center should select different strategy. The experts' shift time had a significant impact on all system performance indicators. Therefore, if managers wanted to improve the system performance to a greater extent, they needed to reduce the shift time as much as possible.