Will You See the Doctor Now? [article]

Adrienne Dawson, Austin, The University Of Texas At
2022
Based on the research of Kumar Muthuraman 4/11/22, 4:49 PM Will You See the Doctor Now?. Two landmark studies use patient... | by Texas McCombs | Big Ideas | Medium https://medium.com/texas-mccombs/will-you-see-the-doctor-now-6529499abd41 2/5 nyone who's gone to the doctor has walked into a waiting room to find it packed with other patients, and the realization hits you that it may be a while before you're seen. There are several reasons why a waiting room could be overcrowded -from doctor
more » ... ness to an emergency that caused a delay -but a primary reason you might have a long wait at your next appointment is because other patients don't always show up. This might seem counterintuitive, but clinics can have patient no-show rates as high as 40-50 percent, so they overbook to compensate. But clinics typically don't account for patient variability when they overbook, which means that an overbooked appointment slot could lead to profit loss if none of the scheduled patients arrive -or overcrowding if all of them do. Research by McCombs Professor Kumar Muthuraman, along with Purdue University co-authors Mark Lawley and Santanu Chakraborty, presents a scheduling model that assesses an individual patient's no-show probability, selects the best available appointment time for that person, and computes a scheduling stopping point for the day -all to ensure minimal wait times and maximum profits.
doi:10.26153/tsw/38574 fatcat:lwjkprugijclvd47hdxjeq3lli