An alternative outpatient scheduling system: Improving the outpatient experience

An Appointment Order Outpatient Scheduling System That Improves Outpatient Experience

Patient wait time and access to care have long been a recognized problem in modern outpatient healthcare delivery systems. Despite all the efforts to develop appointment rules and policies, the problem of long patient waits persists. Regardless of the reasons, the fact remains that there are few implemented models for effective scheduling that consider patient wait times, physician idle time, o...

High dose radioiodine outpatient treatment: an initial experience in Thailand

Objective(s): The aim of this study was to determine whether high-dose radioactive iodine (Na131I) outpatient treatment of patients with thyroid carcinoma is a pragmatically safe approach, particularly for the safety of caregivers. Methods: A total of 79 patients completed the radiation-safety questionnaires prior to receiving high-dose radioactive iodine treatment. The questionnaire studied th...

Optimal outpatient appointment scheduling.

In this paper optimal outpatient appointment scheduling is studied. A local search procedure is derived that converges to the optimal schedule with a weighted average of expected waiting times of patients, idle time of the doctor and tardiness (lateness) as objective. No-shows are allowed to happen. For certain combinations of parameters the well-known Bailey-Welch rule is found to be the optim...

Outpatient surgery--an alternative to hospitalization.

Improving outpatient diabetes care.

More than 20% of patients in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) have diabetes; therefore, disseminating "best practices" in outpatient diabetes care is paramount. The authors' goal was to identify such practices and the factors associated with their development. First, a national VHA diabetes registry with 2008 data identified clinical performance based on the percentage of patients with ...