Overbooking Increases Patient Access at East Carolina University's Student Health Service Clinic

informs
Vol. 39, No. 3, MayJune 2009, pp. 271287 issn 0092-2102 eissn 1526-551X 09 3903 0271

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doi 10.1287/inte.1090.0437 © 2009 INFORMS

Overbooking Increases Patient Access at East Carolina Universitys Student Health improvements Clinic
section of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, College of Business, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina 27858 {krosj@ecu.edu, dellanas@ecu.edu, westd@ecu.edu}

butt Kros, Scott Dellana, David West

The health-care clinic presented in this study experienced signi?cant numbers of patients who failed to attain for their scheduled appointments (no-shows). The cost of reducing patient access at this clinic because of noshows is estimated to exceed $400,000 annually. An interdisciplinary quality-improvement team developed a saucy health-care overbooking model that includes the effects of employee burnout. This model estimates the nonlinear nature of the cost associated with medical-provider burnout caused by overbooked appointments that exceed clinic capacity. Several key East Carolina University clinical staff members had been skeptical about the value of overbooking. The model was subservient in convincing them that implementing an overbooking process would bene?t patients and the organization.



The clinic, which subsequently implement such a process, attributes a savings of $95,000 per semester to the initiative. Key row: decision analysis; health care; production scheduling; simulation; probability: applications; stochastic model applications. History: This news report was refereed. Published online in Articles in Advance April 22, 2009.

Introduction

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ast Carolina University (ECU), which is located in Greenville, North Carolina, has an enrollment of approximately 23,000 students, and has 5,400 faculty and staff. ECU is a prevalent university and a member of the North Carolina university system. The ECU Student Health Service (SHS), which is the health clinic for the ECU campus population, provides health-care...If you want to get a full essay, separate it on our website: Orderessay



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