[Yangtze River Forum] Tang Jiafu: Research Progress in Medical Service Operation Management

On the afternoon of May 11th, Professor Tang Jiafu, Yangtze River Scholar Distinguished Professor of the Ministry of Education, recipient of National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholar, and Dean of School of Management Science and Engineering at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, gave a lecture entitled “Research Progress of Medical Service Operation Management” at the Yangtze River Forum.

Professor Tang Jiafu first pointed out that in a growing economic society, the research direction of medical operation management mainly focuses on the following three areas: first, policy design, second, system design, and third, operation.

He focused on the classification of reservation scheduling systems, environmental factors, performance evaluation indicators, design of rules, classification and research methods of the scheduling issues. He pointed out that outpatient appointment scheduling system is very complicated, and it is difficult to solve due to a large amount of uncertainty.

He emphasized the problem of out-of-order arrival of patients in the appointment scheduling study of outpatients. That is to say, the order of arrival for patients and the order of appointments are inconsistent due to the patient's unpunctuality, which brings about a great deal of difficulties for the establishment of analytical models and the solution of the problem. So he put forward a countermeasure on this issue ------ time window design. Finally, he explained in more details through an academic paper Optimization of Outpatient Appointments Scheduling Considering Unpunctually.