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Title |
An Efficient Greedy Approach for Online Patients to Doctors Assignment in a Telemedicine System |
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Author |
Muhammad Idrees, Waheed Iqba, Shafaat Ahmed Bazaz, Faisal Bukhari |
| Citation |
Vol. 16 No. 4 pp. 1-8 |
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Abstract |
Telemedicine is a doctor-assistance system which helps to provide healthcare services to patients residing in remote and underprivileged areas. A usual predominant issue associated with this field is the scarcity of trained doctors to serve a large number of patients. In this paper, we take a step to address the scarcity of trained doctors. We proposed and evaluated an algorithm to optimally utilize available doctors in a telemedicine system which minimizes overall waiting time of patients. We used three important parameters of doctors including consultation time, switching time, and workload to develop a scheduling algorithm named Minimum Wait Optimal Load (MWOL) which efficiently utilizes available doctors and minimizes average patients waiting time. We performed discrete event simulations to evaluate our proposed algorithm and compared it with a Round Robin (a strategy that assigns next available doctor to a patient) algorithm with varying consultation and switching time of doctors. Our proposed algorithm MWOL showed increase in its efficiency as compare to Round Robin algorithm from 0.0% to 37.34% and serves more patients in majority of our simulations. We believe that the proposed scheduling algorithm would contribute in telemedicine systems to minimize average patient waiting time and maximize optimal utilization of available doctors thus providing improvement in quality and stability at system level. |
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Keywords |
Patient Scheduling, Telemedicine System, Doctor Utilization, Consultation Time, Switching Time. |
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