My internist of many years, Dr. Gulden, never ceased to amaze me before he retired. For every scheduled appointment, I was seen within 5 minutes of my arrival! This led to research I did in 1994, when I found that the average wait time in doctors’ offices in the US was 20.6 minutes, costing about $15 billion per year in lost productivity.
I guess this topic was of interest since the finding made the front page of papers around the country, from the Boston Globe to the Miami Herald. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal (Oct.19,2010), with the headline “The Doctor Will See You Eventually“, announced that the “average time patients spend waiting to see a health care professional is now 22 minutes, and some waits stretch for hours”. Are any of us who teach OM shocked?
This is a great article to discuss when you cover waiting line models in Module D. But it may also be useful in Supp.7, Capacity and Constraint Management, because the Journal talks about cutting cycle time. In one doctor’s office, patients helped measure their times from arrival until departure. By identifying bottlenecks, the doctor was able to cut 12 minutes from the typical 40 minute stay.
So why was Dr. Gulden so successful in keeping on-schedule? I think there was one main reason: he made all his staff understand that each patient’s time was as valuable as his was.
Discussion questions:
1. Ask your students to rank the seven methods the article discusses in terms of what they think are the best for time savings payoff.
2. Many hospitals now advertise their ER wait times. What have they done to improve their process flows?
3.What kind of queuing models can be used in a doctor’s office?