Online Auction-Based Scheduling of Health Care Services for Outpatients

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Canada's rapidly aging population is placing ever increasing demands on limited health care services, especially in more remote regions of the country. Optimized scheduling is the only way to meet this challenge. In this research, each service has a limited number of available time slots. These time slots are posted on a website and a group email is sent to all outpatients. The email directs these individuals to indicate their service requirements by using the website. Outpatients as bidders express their requests as bundles of service time slots. Each bundle consists of several time slots. Each outpatient has a composed priority value for a service to indicate the level of urgency relative to all patients. In fact, the priority value is similar to the price a bidder is willing to pay in an auction. To bid for time slots, outpatients must consider special constraints relative to their needs, e.g., length of the bundles, number of slots, and preferences.