BACKGROUND Shared medical appointments are a series of one-to-one doctor-patient contacts, in presence of a group of 6-10 fellow patients. This group visits substitute the annual control visits of patients with the neurologist. The same items attended to in a one-to-one appointment are addressed. The possible advantages of a shared medical appointment could be an added value to the present mana...

OBJECTIVE Conduct a formative evaluation to inform the implementation of 'Empowering Patients in Chronic Care' (EPIC), an evidence-based interdisciplinary group medical appointment intervention to improve collaborative goal-setting in patients with treated but uncontrolled diabetes. DESIGN The formative evaluation involved qualitative, in-depth interviews with clinicians, structured according...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine if there is a correlation between the time in advance an appointment is scheduled and the no-show rate. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study conducted in an outpatient ophthalmology clinic. Appointment data were analyzed for 51,529 ophthalmology appointments in the computerized scheduling database during a 12-month period. RESULTS The a...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether text mining can accurately detect specific follow-up appointment criteria in free-text hospital discharge records. DESIGN Cross-sectional study. SETTING Mayo Clinic Rochester hospitals. PARTICIPANTS Inpatients discharged from general medicine services in 2006 (n = 6481). INTERVENTIONS Textual hospital dismissal summaries were manually reviewed to determine...

We consider the problem of determining an optimal appointment schedule for a given sequence of jobs (e.g., medical procedures) on a single processor (e.g., operating room, examination facility, physician), to minimize the expected total underage and overage costs when each job has a random processing duration given by a joint discrete probability distribution. Simple conditions on the cost rate...

Many primary care offices and other medical practices regularly experience long backlogs for appointments. These backlogs are exacerbated by a significant level of last-minute cancellations or “no-shows,” which have the effect of wasting capacity. In this paper, we conceptualize such an appointment system as a single-server queueing system in which customers who are about to enter service have ...

We examine the effect of the appointment of directors on the share price of FTSE companies. We find that the share price reaction to the appointment of Directors suggests that gender is not an issue in the appointment of Non-Executive Directors, but it does have an effect on the market reaction to the appointment of Executive Directors. Corresponding Author: Brian M Lucey, School of Business an...

This paper considers the effectiveness of a truck appointment system in improving the yard efficiency of the container terminal. This research uses truck appointment information to improve the import container retrieval operation and reduce container rehandles by adopting an advanced container location assignment algorithm. By reducing the container rehandles, the terminal could improve yard cr...

Through a phone-based field experiment, I investigated the effect of mental help seekers' race, class, and gender on the accessibility of psychotherapists. Three hundred and twenty psychotherapists each received voicemail messages from one black middle-class and one white middle-class help seeker, or from one black working-class and one white working-class help seeker, requesting an appointment...