An Alternative Outpatient Scheduling System

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 book presents a solution for the
scheduling of procedures and appointments of any
given facility that both patient wait time and
physician idle time meet the declared scheduling
policies. Furthermore, this book provides the
implementation results from three case studies to
support the approach. The implementations confirm
that the system can effectively reduce patient wait
time as much as 56% without significantly increasing
physician idle time per patient.