At various points in my career I’ve been taught time-management skills. Despite this, time seems as slippery as ever, and rarely does what it’s told. When I was a junior doctor, my time was managed by my pager. Now, the appointment book is in charge. Each name in the list stares back at me with a perfect rectangle surrounding it. There’s a gap in the names that corresponds with lunchtime. There...

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...

We describe a spoken language system that schedules appointments over the telephone. The system has a calendar of available times for some service that callers want to obtain. The system and the caller engage in a cooperative dialogue until a mutually satisfactory appointment time can be found and scheduled. The system has three parts: a speech recog-nizer based on neural network phoneme classi...

PROBLEM ADDRESSED Patients have to wait too long to see their family physicians. Open access, a new approach to office scheduling, has shown promise in reducing patient wait times to see primary care physicians. OBJECTIVE OF PROGRAM To offer same-day appointments to most patients who call the office, thus reducing wait times as measured by the third available appointment. Reductions in no-sho...

BACKGROUND Missed hospital appointments are a major cause of inefficiency worldwide. Healthcare providers are increasingly using Short Message Service reminders to reduce 'Did Not Attend' (DNA) rates. Systematic reviews show that sending such reminders is effective, but there is no evidence on whether their impact is affected by their content. Accordingly, we undertook two randomised controlled...

We propose a protocol based on coherent states and linear optics operations for solving the appointmentscheduling problem. Our main protocol leaks strictly less information about each party’s input than the optimal classical protocol, even when considering experimental errors. Along with the ability to generate constant-amplitude coherent states over two modes, this protocol requires the abilit...