Common wisdom suggests that, everything else being equal, seeing patients sooner rather than later is preferable. In particular, health outcomes improve with reduced delay and so does patient satisfaction. Meanwhile, if the delay in access to care is reduced, rescheduling becomes easier and thus...

This paper studies how to schedule medical appointments with time-dependent patient no-show behavior and random service times. The problem is motivated by our studies of independent datasets from countries in two continents which unanimously identify a significant time-of-day effect on patient...