Broken appointments continue to be an important productivity, quality assurance, and access gauge for private dental practices and academic dental centers. In November 2001, the University of Rochester Eastman Dental Center, an urban academic dental center, installed an automated confirmation system to address a high incidence of broken appointments. Following the installation of the system, th...

Modeling the scheduling of patient appointments is an important issue in simulating a health care delivery facility. A simulation model must include the control logic of appointment scheduling software and the explicit and implicit decision rules used by the human scheduler in selecting an appointment time. Expert systems provide one way of modeling such control logic and decision rules. We des...

INTRODUCTION Patient appointment systems are of great importance for efficiently managing outpatient clinics as well as patient satisfaction as an indirect indicator for quality care rendered. PURPOSE To describe the hourly block and standard sequential scheduling appointment systems at two different hospitals, as well as to assess the patients' opinions regarding their waiting time in both s...

BACKGROUND Long waiting times for registration to see a doctor is problematic in China, especially in tertiary hospitals. To address this issue, a web-based appointment system was developed for the Xijing hospital. The aim of this study was to investigate the efficacy of the web-based appointment system in the registration service for outpatients. METHODS Data from the web-based appointment s...

We develop a queueing model for an appointment-based service system that consists of two queues in tandem: the appointment queue followed by the service queue. Customers join the appointment queue when they call for appointments, stay there (not physically) until the appointment time comes, and then leave the appointment queue and may physically join the service queue, and wait there until serv...