Abstract: Outpatient appointment scheduling is a hot and difficult problem in the field of medical operation and management. At present, many large hospitals in China open a variety of registration channels. In other words, there are multiple channels for patients to choose from, such as queueing in the outpatient hall, dialing the registration hotline or making an appointment through the Internet terminal. Therefore, when a variety of outpatient registration modes co-exist, it is particularly important to develop different waiting time strategies according to the characteristics of patients. In this paper, the waiting time is taken as a key factor affecting the behavior of patients' channel choice from a new perspective. First of all, under the assumption of the exogenous price, the channel selection model of patients is constructed based on the utility theory, which takes the patient's channel preference, time sensitivity and advance payment sensitivity into account. Then the demand distributions under different market conditions are derived from the channel selection model. On these bases, the hospital develops different waiting time strategies to achieve the purpose of maximizing profits. The results show that:(1) in all cases, the larger time sensitivity and the smaller channel preference lead to a shorter waiting time; (2) when there are two or three channels, the patient's preference for the channel will also have an impact on the results. The larger the proportion of patients who prefer a channel, the longer the waiting time for the patients who choose the channel; (3) besides, the patient's sensitivity to advance payment does not affect the optimal waiting time.This paper provides a guidance for hospitals to develop reasonable time strategies, which help to alleviate the conflict between doctors and patients and complete the rational allocation of medical resources.

Key words: medical care O2O, waiting time, channel selection, outpatient appointment