Improved Waiting Time Estimation Algorithm for Outpatient’s Arrival Planning

Abstract

When a pandemic occurs, many people come to the hospital at the same time. This caused congestion and infections in the outpatient department. In the research of Tantitharanukul et al., (2018), the waiting time estimation (WTE) algorithm was proposed. It is based on queuing theory to estimate the waiting time for the outpatients to plan their arrival. It can help to decrease the congestion of outpatients waiting in a queue at the outpatient department. However, the WTE algorithm does not perform well under some constraints, such as when the patient arrival rate is greater than or equal to the service rate. Thus, in this work, we improved the WTE algorithm. The result shows that the improved algorithm can estimate the waiting time closer to the actual waiting time than the WTE algorithm in 3,945 cases from 5,491 cases, this is 71.84% that the improved algorithm can overcome the WTE algorithm. The summation of the errors of the proposed algorithm is 536,454 minutes less than the WTE algorithm.