Centralized referral systems can both shorten wait times and preserve patient autonomy

Patient Flow Analysis in General Hospitals: How Clinical Disciplines Affect Outpatient Wait Times

Background: Overcrowding is an important problem for outpatient services in healthcare facilities. Patient flow analysis (PFA) is a useful method for identifying inefficiencies in and facilitating patient flow. Objective: PFA was used to estimate patient wait time and determine how different clinical disciplines impact wait times in the studied hospital.<...

Autonomy and Electronic Health Records: Can We Have Both?

Physicians, as highly-trained professionals, have a sense of autonomy about how they perform their work. Electronic health record (EHR) systems can be constraining and thus may affect physicians’ sense of autonomy. Such effects have been reported in the literature, but they may be due to managers using the EHR to exercise more control. We are studying an EHR implementation in an organization kn...

Unacceptable emergency wait times.

Optimal Scheduling Disciplines in Systems with Wait-dependent Service Times

In this paper, we consider the problem of scheduling a nite number of jobs with stochastic wait-dependent processing times. We review the literature on this topic and present some new results. In particular, for certain processing time functions, we nd the policy which stochastically minimizes the makespan of the system.

Advertising Emergency Department Wait Times

Advertising emergency department (ED) wait times has become a common practice in the United States. Proponents of this practice state that it is a powerful marketing strategy that can help steer patients to the ED. Opponents worry about the risk to the public health that arises from a patient with an emergent condition self-triaging to a further hospital, problems with inaccuracy and lack of st...