Emergency departments (ED) overcrowding, long wait, and uncomfortable waiting room conditions may lower perceived quality of the patient experience and satisfaction. This study investigates the relationship between patient satisfaction and communication of expected wait times, at the point of triage. A pre-post (11/4/ 2008 – 2/5/2009) group design with convenience sample (n=1,209) of all discha...

The aim of this study was to determine the prognostic value of wait time from histological diagnosis to primary treatmen for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) treated with intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT). Between October 2009 and February 2012, a total of 1672 NPC patients were retrospectively analyzed. A cutoff value of > 4 weeks was used to define prolonged wait time. Matched patients ac...

OBJECTIVES Even in a publicly funded health care system, access to care may be related to socioeconomic status (SES). For children, delays in surgical procedures can have profound functional, social, and psychological effects with lifelong impact. The purpose of this study was to determine whether SES was related to meeting surgical wait time access targets for children. We also assessed the ef...

This article introduces a self-stabilizing deadlock-detection algorithm for the OR model. The algorithm is complete, because it detects all deadlocks, and it is correct, because it does not detect false deadlocks. Because of the self-stabilization property, the algorithm supports dynamic changes in the wait-for graph on which it works, and transient faults; also, it can be started in an arbitra...

BACKGROUND Assessment of current wait times for specialist health services in Canada is a key method that can assist government and health care providers to plan wisely for future health needs. These data are not readily available. A method to capture wait time data at the time of consultation or procedure has been developed, which should be applicable to other specialist groups and also allows...

The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) launched the Wait Time Strategy in 2004 to improve access to healthcare by reducing the wait times for procedures and treatments. A fundamental component of the strategy was the development of the Wait Time Information System (WTIS). On behalf of the MOHLTC, Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) delivered the first electronic application used by ho...

Building Ontario's Wait Time Information System (WTIS) was one of the largest and most complex technology projects Cancer Care Ontario (CCO) had ever taken on. Increasing public concern about wait times and the lack of adequate tools to provide a clear or accurate picture of provincial wait times had led to a sense of urgency for the province to report wait time data. While healthcare providers...

PURPOSE Radiotherapy with or without chemotherapy is the primary treatment for patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). It wastes time from diagnosis to treatment. Treatment time of radiotherapy generally takes at least seven weeks. The current study aimed to evaluate factors associated with prolonged wait time and longer duration of radiotherapy in NPC patients. METHODS AND MATERIALS Fr...

Scalasca is a performance toolset that has been specifically designed to analyze parallel application execution behavior on large-scale systems with many thousands of processors. It offers an incremental performance-analysis procedure that integrates runtime summaries with in-depth studies of concurrent behavior via event tracing, adopting a strategy of successively refined measurement configur...

The impetus for this research was examining a flow shop problem in which tasks were expected to be successively carried out with no time interval (i.e., no wait time) between them. For this reason, they should be completed by specific dates or deadlines. In this regard, the efficiency of the models was evaluated based on makespan. To solve the NP-Hard problem, we developed two mathematical mode...