1. An Alternative Outpatient Scheduling System: Improving the Outpatient Experience.
- Author
-
Huang, Yu-Li
- Subjects
- Outpatient Scheduling System
- Abstract
Patient wait time has long been a recognized problem in modern outpatient health care delivery systems. Despite all the efforts to develop appointment rules and solutions, the problem of long patient waits persists. Regardless of the reasons for this problem, the fact remains that there are few implemented models for effective scheduling that consider patient wait times as well as physician idle time and are generalized sufficiently to accommodate a variety of outpatient health care settings. This research proposes a solution that best models the scheduling of procedures and appointments so that both patient wait time and physician idle time meet the declared policy of a facility. Furthermore, this research provides a step by step method for implementation as well as the implementation results from three case studies for: data collection, determination of the best scheduled time interval for each visit type, creation of a physician schedule and a corresponding patient arrival schedule. The case studies also illustrate how to implement the method and adapt it to different clinical settings. The implementations confirm that the system can effectively reduce patient wait time as much as 56% without significantly increasing physician idle time per patient.
- Published
- 2008