T he current state of outpatient healthcare delivery is characterized by capacity shortages and long waits for appointments, yet a substantial fraction of valuable doctors’ capacity is wasted due to no-shows. In this study, we examine the effect of wait to appointment on patient flow, specifically on a patient’s decision to schedule an appointment and to subsequently arrive to it. These two dec...

BACKGROUND Understanding factors relating to the perception of wait time by patients is key to improving the patient experience. METHODS We surveyed 122 breast and 90 prostate cancer patients presenting at clinics or listed on the cancer registry in Newfoundland and Labrador and reviewed their charts. We compared the wait time (first visit to diagnosis) and the wait-related satisfaction for b...

BACKGROUND Providing emergency department (ED) wait time information to the public has been suggested as a mechanism to reduce lengthy ED wait times (by enabling patients to select the ED site with shorter wait time), but the effects of such a program have not been evaluated. We evaluated the effects of such a program in a community with two ED sites. METHODS Descriptive statistics for wait t...

This paper considers a no-wait multi product flowshop scheduling problem with sequence dependent setup times. Lot streaming divide the lots of products into portions called sublots in order to reduce the lead times and work-in-process, and increase the machine utilization rates. The objective is to minimize the makespan. To clarify the system, mathematical model of the problem is presented. Sin...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of 2 different interventions on wait times at a hospital outpatient pharmacy: (1) giving feedback to employees about customer satisfaction with wait times and (2) giving a combined intervention package that included giving more specific feedback about actual wait times and goal setting for wait time reduction in addition to the custom...