Increasing appointment keeping by reducing the call-appointment interval.

Threading by Appointment

We propose a concurrent programming model called threading-by-appointment (TAP). Unlike traditional threads, TAP threads can only communicate with system components or other threads by appointment. For example, a TAP thread cannot simply try to access some shared resource. Instead, a TAP thread must make an appointment with the shared resource in advance. Only at the time of the appointment, th...

Appointment keeping behavior of Medicaid vs non-Medicaid orthodontic patients.

INTRODUCTION State Medicaid programs were established to care for the poor by eliminating financial barriers that otherwise prevent them from being treated in the mainstream health care system. The number of children eligible for Medicaid services is increasing, yet the number of Medicaid providers remains low. Health care providers cited failed appointments as a major problem with Medicaid pat...

Toward a better understanding of dental appointment-keeping behavior.

OBJECTIVE Broken appointments cause adverse outcomes in healthcare systems: They interrupt continuity of care, waste resources, affect workflow, and reduce population-wide access to care. A better understanding of dental appointment-keeping behavior would support efforts toward designing novel interventions aimed at reducing rates of broken appointments. METHODS The authors conducted a concep...

The 10-minute appointment.

Robust Appointment Scheduling

We consider the problem of appointment scheduling in a robust optimization framework. The appointment scheduling problem arises in many service operations, for example health care. For each job, we are given its minimum and maximum possible execution times. The objective is to find an appointment schedule for which the cost in the worst case scenario of the realization of the processing times o...