Overbooked and Overlooked: Machine Learning and Racial Bias in Medical Appointment Scheduling

Michele Samorani (), Shannon L. Harris (), Linda Goler Blount (), Haibing Lu () and Michael A. Santoro ()
Additional contact information
Michele Samorani: Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California 95053
Shannon L. Harris: School of Business, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia 23284
Linda Goler Blount: Black Women’s Health Imperative, Washington, District of Columbia 20003
Haibing Lu: Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California 95053
Michael A. Santoro: Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California 95053

Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2022, vol. 24, issue 6, 2825-2842

Abstract: Problem definition: Machine learning is often employed in appointment scheduling to identify the patients with the greatest no-show risk, so as to schedule them into or right after overbooked slots. That scheduling decision maximizes the clinic performance, as measured by a weighted sum of all patients’ waiting time and the provider’s overtime and idle time. However, if a racial group is characterized by a higher no-show risk, then the patients belonging to that racial group will be scheduled into or right after overbooked slots disproportionately to the general population. Academic/Practical Relevance: That scheduling decision is problematic because patients scheduled in those slots tend to have a worse service experience than the other patients, as measured by the time they spend in the waiting room. Thus, the challenge becomes minimizing the schedule cost while avoiding racial disparities. Methodology : Motivated by the real-world case of a large specialty clinic whose black patients have a higher no-show probability than non-black patients, we analytically study racial disparity in this context. Then, we propose new objective functions that minimize both schedule cost and racial disparity and that can be readily adopted by researchers and practitioners. We develop a race-aware objective, which instead of minimizing the waiting times of all patients, minimizes the waiting times of the racial group expected to wait the longest. We also develop race-unaware methodologies that do not consider race explicitly. We validate our findings both on simulated and real-world data. Results : We demonstrate that state-of-the-art scheduling systems cause the black patients in our data set to wait about 30% longer than nonblack patients. Our race-aware methodology achieves both goals of eliminating racial disparity and obtaining a similar schedule cost as that obtained by the state-of-the-art scheduling method, whereas the race-unaware methodologies fail to obtain both efficiency and fairness. Managerial implications : Our work uncovers that the traditional objective of minimizing schedule cost may lead to unintended racial disparities. Both efficiency and fairness can be achieved by adopting a race-aware objective.

Keywords: appointment scheduling; healthcare operations; machine learning; racial bias; racial equity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/msom.2021.0999 (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:inm:ormsom:v:24:y:2022:i:6:p:2825-2842

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().