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What We Can Learn from How Service-Oriented Industries Manage No-Shows

Published:September 18, 2019DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2019.08.032
      A significant source of waste in health care is unutilized time slots due to patients that never show up for their scheduled examination. The total lost revenue for a medium-sized outpatient imaging center that attempted to proactively prevent same-day missed appointments (no-shows and patients who call to cancel the same day) came to approximately $1.5 million in 2017 and $1.8 million in 2018. After 4 years of running experiments to try and change patient behavior to reduce the occurrences of same-day missed appointments, it became obvious that a different solution is required. The need for an automated system to proactively manage utilization in outpatient imaging centers was established in “Reducing the Impact of Same-Day Missed Appointments” [
      • Speece J.
      Reducing the impact of same-day missed appointments.
      ]. The primary objective is to build a system that optimizes utilization without a dependency on patient behavior modification.
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