Study on specialist outpatient matching appointment and the balance matching model

Abstract

Currently specialists’ outpatient appointments in large hospitals in China are made by patients’ one-side choice of specialists, and most are “first select first served”. A specialist cannot choose a patient according to his specialty. Because of the “worship of famous doctors” and asymmetric information between specialists and patients, the appointments are often made with certain blindness, thus it is difficult for patients to get the best diagnosis and treatment from specialists. In this paper, we apply the two-sided matching theory, from the both views of patients and specialists, we design specialists-outpatients matching appointment system, in the system, we propose the process of the appointment and the one-to-many appointment matching algorithm. In order to provide fairness to both sides, we apply the theory of balance-matching, construct the algorithm of one-to-one and one-to-many two-sided balance matching. At last, through the computational examples we prove the model is effective in hospital specialists outpatient appointment.