A cost-effective urgent care policy to improve patient access in a dynamic scheduled clinic setting

Yu-Li Huang, Paulina Zuniga and Justin Marcak
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Yu-Li Huang: Department of Industrial Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA
Paulina Zuniga: Department of Industrial Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA
Justin Marcak: Department of Industrial Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2014, vol. 65, issue 5, 763-776

Abstract: Patient no-show in outpatient clinics has been a long recognized issue, which negatively impacts clinic operational efficiency in terms of costs and patient access to care. One way to reduce these negative impacts is to allow urgent walk-ins during a clinic day. Some clinics allow random walk-ins and some purposely leave open time slots to accommodate them. The objective of this paper is to develop a cost-effective urgent care policy that is added on top of a full schedule and takes into account scheduled patients’ no-show rates to improve patient access to care in a dynamic clinic environment. The findings indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the current random and urgent slot approaches. This paper demonstrates a dynamic approach for accommodating urgent patients into a patient scheduling system, based on the prediction of an individual patient's no-show probability and the maximum number of urgent patients allowed.

Date: 2014
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