An Adaptive Strategy for Wait Time Management

Healthcare service managers often consider how to improve service management behavior to better service performance. Commonly-faced problems include how to allocate time blocks of operating rooms (ORs) for patients who have different levels of urgency and how to schedule patients so as to shorten wait times. In this chapter, we discuss how to design adaptive strategies for time block allocations in ORs with the aim of improving service performance with respect to unpredictable patient arrivals.