. This
paper deals with performance analysis and improvement of the
appointment system for the MRI scanning facility of the Radiology
department of a tertiary private hospital in a metropolitan city
situated in eastern India.
The objective of this paper is to model the patient flows in
the case study MRI section under various appointment scheduling
rules in order to gain insights about how to schedule the appointments
for multiple classes of patients so that the waiting times
of different patient classes are minimized and the utilization of
the MRI machine is maximized. In the majority of studies of appointment
systems that consider different classes of patients (e.g.,
[1–3]), either the patients are classified as outpatients, inpatients
(unscheduled) and emergency patients (i.e., a single class of scheduled
patients is considered) or the classification of scheduled patients
is made on the basis of one patient characteristic (e.g., mean
service time) and the patients are assumed to be homogeneous
on the basis of other characteristics (e.g., non-punctuality and noshows).