Choosing and booking – and attending? Impact of an electronic booking system on outpatient referrals and non-attendances

Mark Dusheiko and Hugh Gravelle
Additional contact information
Mark Dusheiko: Centre for Health Economics, University of York, UK. Institut Univesitaire de Medicine Preventive et Social, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.

No 116cherp, Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, University of York

Abstract: An electronic booking system (Choose and Book – C&B) for general practices making hospital outpatient appointments was introduced in England in 2005 and by 2009 accounted for 50% of appointments. It was intended, inter alia, to reduce the rate of non-attendance at outpatient appointments (7.1% in 2004). We test whether it did so using a 2004-2009 panel with 7900 English general practices. We estimate that the use of C&B was associated with a reduction in nonattendances of 85,600 (15.8%) and a reduction in referrals of 358,000 (3%) in 2009.

Keywords: referrals; non-attendance; outpatients; general practice; gatekeeping (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2015-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.york.ac.uk/media/che/documents/papers/r ... rals_attendances.pdf First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chy:respap:116cherp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Centre for Health Economics, University of York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gill Forder ().