Redefining policies to reduce the negative effects of patient no-show

Patient no-show in outpatient clinics has been a long recognized issue, which negatively impacts clinic operational efficiency in terms of cost and patient access to care. In healthcare policy development, researchers and practitioners have attempted to find scheduling techniques that allow optimal resource utilization and cost minimization. However, the problem of no-shows persists. This research focuses on redefining three commonly used policies, overbooking, cancellation, and walk-in, to reduce the negative effects of no-show in the outpatient facilities while the costs of patient wait time, physician idle time, and overtime are minimized. The proposed overbooking policy accounts for the predictive probability of no-shows of a scheduled patient to determine if overbooking is appropriate for a particular time slot. The proposed cancellation policy accounts for no-show rates, clinic's flow, and time slot fill rates to replace the current arbitrary 24-hour cancellation policy. The walk-in policy also considers the no-show probability at each time slot to allow urgent walk-ins on top of a full schedule. The three redefined policies provide better guidelines for clinics to follow and, consequently, improve the outpatient experience for both patients and medical providers.