Abstract
Service industries including the health care industries have become an increasingly important sector in Taiwan. After the implementation of National Health Insurance program, the relationship between patients and hospital has become a customer oriented. The competition of hospitals have become harder and harder. Hospitals must provide more medical service and improve service quality to attract more patients while improve operation performance. It is important to apply the concept of modern business and hospital management to solve complicated problem. To combine medical domain knowledge and management can not only improve efficiency of medical resources but also raise service and medical quality.The study aims to increase service quality through reducing patient waiting time and increase profit through increase operation efficiency in equipment utilization of physical therapy in the rehabilitation department. We construct the patient scheduling problem of physical therapy as a hybrid shop scheduling problem, and propose a mixed integer programming model to solve this scheduling problem finding the optimal solution that each patient has minimum waiting time. This study also develops a genetic algorithm to solve complex problems in practice and displays the solution graphically to help medical people scheduling patients. Based on the real settings in a Medical Center, experiments have bean done to estimate the validity of this approach. The results show that the proposed model and algorithm could reduce patients’ waiting time to increase service quality and improve the efficiency of medical resources in the rehabilitation department.