Scheduling medical tests: A solution to the problem of overcrowding in a hospital emergency department

To improve the performance of hospital emergency department (ED), we propose a scheduling strategy to reduce the total time of medical tests in ED for a given number of patients. We model the schedulig strategy as a constraint logic programming problem, and then solve this problem with an open source software: Minizinc. Also we compare the medical test time with the scheduling strategy and that without scheduling, which is viewed as a benchmark for our proposed scheduling strategy. The results show that the scheduling strategy can save 12%–25% of medical test time.