Patient scheduling in hemodialysis service

The patient scheduling presents a number of operations management challenges in hemodialysis service center. The homogeneity of the break time between treatments, satisfying the patients preferences on time, space and equipment and the multi-function dialysis devices make for an interesting and complex scheduling problem that could benefit from computerized decision support. In this paper, patient scheduling problem in hemodialysis service is formulated as a synthetic-objective optimization model combined with several criteria on minimizing the gross utilization cost of devices, the number of night treatment, satisfying the patients preferences and the equilibrium of the devices. A basic heuristics and a rollout algorithm based on the heuristics are developed for solving the problem where three levels of treatment schedule sets are constructed one by one. The performances of the rollout algorithm and the basic heuristics are compared on the real cases. Computational results show that significant improvement of patients degree of satisfaction can be achieved with the rollout algorithm while simultaneously considering to reduce the number of night shifts.