Application of Capacity Planning on Dental Health Service System (II)

Quality of healthcare services recently has received increasing attention. In the competitive environment of health care industry, improve service quality is its one of the most important issue. Lengthy waiting time to see the doctor is one of the main reasons for patients’ complaint and will induce patient dissatisfaction. Well-designed appointment systems are used to shorten the patients’ waiting time as well as reduce complaints and enhance patient satisfaction. However, dental service differs much from other medical service. The design of the service system in dental care should be investigated separately. In Taiwan, there are so many dental clinics that the market competition is intensively. The service system design in dental care is of vital important. We therefore propose this project to deal with the service system design to enhance the dental service quality under the intensive competition scenario. In the study, we will design the system of outpatient appointment by establishing dynamic and stochastic simulation model to assess the performance of the outpatient appointment system. To have good grasp of the problem, patient behavior and the records of dental treatment will be analysis. Highly realistic virtual environment will be created to generate the outpatient appointment rule, which consists of three elements: initial block, appointment interval and block size. With well design appointment system, outpatient could make an appointment and the time of appointment will be arranged appropriately. Accordingly, the idle time of dentist and the patient waiting time will be reduced effectively. Features of the being established appointment system include: multiple dentists with different levels of expertise, two types of patients, the different level of patient no-show rates, a variety of dental treatments with vary durations. This research issue is new from the academic perspective and their solutions will be valuable from the perspective of enhancing the dental service quality.

Project ID:PB10408-5759
External Project ID:MOST104-2221-E182-011