Appointment Rule of Outpatient Dental Service with Patient Classification and Multi-Procedure

In the competitive environment of health care industry, service quality of health care is regarded as a competitive weapon. Therefore, the hospital managers devote to enhance their quality of service. Short waiting time would induce patient satisfaction, which is one of the most important indicators for the service quality. In practice, long waiting time of seeing a doctor is one of the main reasons for patients’ complaint and patient unsatisfied. In the outpatient health care, patient waiting for consultation is a common phenomenon. 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 design of outpatient appointment in dental care is of vital important. We therefore propose this project to deal with the service system design for outpatient appointment to enhance the dental service quality under the intensive competition scenario. With well design appointment system, outpatient could make an appointment and the time of appointment will be scheduled appropriately. Accordingly, the idle time and over-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 levels of patient no-show rates, a variety of dental treatments with vary durations. This research issue is new for the perspective of the academic and their solutions will be valuable from the perspective of enhancing the dental service quality.

Project ID:PB10507-1878
External Project ID:MOST105-2221-E182-045