INTRODUCTION Health economic models are increasingly important in funding decisions but most are based on data, which may therefore not represent the general population. We sought to establish the potential of real-world data available within the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) and linked Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) to determine comprehensive healthcare utilisation and costs as...

OBJECTIVE To determine actual availability and cost of general practitioner appointments for children with conditions of low acuity and low urgency, from the perspective of the child's family. DESIGN, PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING A "secret shopper" method, whereby research assistants posing as parents seeking appointments for mildly ill children telephoned a random sample of 225 general practice ...

Many outpatient clinics are experimenting with open access scheduling. Under open access, patients see their physicians within a day or two of making their appointment request, and long-term patient booking is very limited. The hope is that these short appointment lead times will improve patient access and reduce uncertainty in clinic operations by reducing patient no-shows. Practice shows that...

PURPOSE To describe the outcomes of a nurse practitioner (NP)-facilitated group medical appointment (GMA) intervention for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) clients in a pulmonary practice in the Midwest. DATA SOURCES Medical records from a convenience sample of six established pulmonary patients in a Midwest specialty clinic who received care in a group format were retrospectively...

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between communication skills training for patients and their compliance with recommended treatment. DESIGN A randomized control design was used, with patients nested within physicians. Each physician was audiotaped with 6 patients, 2 patients in each of the 3 intervention conditions: (1) a trained group (n = 50) received a training booklet in the mail 2 t...

We consider the problem of evaluating an appointment schedule for outpatients in a hospital. Given a fixed-length session during which a physician sees K patients, each patient has to be given an appointment time during this session in advance. When a patient arrives on its appointment, the consultations of the previous patients are either already finished or are still going on, which respectiv...

We consider the problem of appointment scheduling in a robust optimization framework. The appointment scheduling problem arises in many service operations, for example health care. For each job, we are given its minimum and maximum possible execution times. The objective is to find an appointment schedule for which the cost in the worst case scenario of the realization of the processing times o...

We describe a spoken language system that schedules appointments over the telephone. The system has a calendar of available times for some service that callers want to obtain. The system and the caller engage in a cooperative dialogue until a mutually satisfactory appointment time can be found and scheduled. The system has three parts: a speech recog-nizer based on neural network phoneme classi...

OBJECTIVE To improve access to new pediatric endocrinology appointments in an urban academic hospital faculty-based practice. METHODS Three strategies were implemented to increase the number of appointment slots: new patient appointments were protected from conversion to follow-up appointments; all physicians, including senior faculty, were scheduled to see 3 to 4 new patients per session; an...