Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of dealing with a cancer diagnosis – either personally or as a caregiver to a friend or loved one – must have at some point wondered why they invariably had to wait well past their treatment appointment time, every time.
The root cause is that the healthcare scheduling system is broken. Healthcare providers are using a calculator, spreadsheets and standard electronic health record (EHR) templates to solve a math problem that demands a cluster of servers and data scientists to solve effectively.
Most EHRs use scheduling templates that have no real scheduling intelligence built in. In their efforts to be patient-centric, they typically subscribe to a first-come, first-served «hair salon» methodology. Even the best among them use gut-based rules of thumb to accommodate patient and staff needs for a particular appointment slot. The result is, in effect, the opposite of a patient-centric situation – a domino effect of longer wait times and unhappy patients and doctors.