Improving Hospital Outpatient Clinics Appointment Schedules by Prediction Models.

Patient no-shows and suboptimal patient appointment length scheduling reduce clinical efficiency and impair the clinic's quality of service. The main objective of this study is to improve appointment scheduling in hospital outpatient clinics. We developed generic supervised machine learning models t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Medical Systems Vol. 47; no. 1; pp. 1 - 15
Main Authors: Babayoff, Orel, Shehory, Onn, Geller, Shamir, Shitrit-Niselbaum, Chen, Weiss-Meilik, Ahuva, Sprecher, Eli
Format: equations & formulas research tables/charts Journal Article
Published: Springer Nature 2023
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: 2023
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      pub: Springer Nature
      place: New York, New York
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        10.1007/s10916-022-01902-3
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        atl: Improving Hospital Outpatient Clinics Appointment Schedules by Prediction Models.
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          Babayoff, Orel
          Shehory, Onn
          Geller, Shamir
          Shitrit-Niselbaum, Chen
          Weiss-Meilik, Ahuva
          Sprecher, Eli
        affil: Bar-Ilan University, 5290002, Ramat Gan, Israel
      sug:
        subj:
          Appointments and Schedules
          Hospitals
          Outpatient Service
          Prediction Models
          Quality Improvement
          Program Development
          Machine Learning
          Human
          Algorithms
          Retrospective Design
          Comparative Studies
          Time Factors
          Patient Compliance Evaluation
          Data Analysis Methods
          Descriptive Statistics
          Funding Source
      ab: Patient no-shows and suboptimal patient appointment length scheduling reduce clinical efficiency and impair the clinic's quality of service. The main objective of this study is to improve appointment scheduling in hospital outpatient clinics. We developed generic supervised machine learning models to predict patient no-shows and patient's length of appointment (LOA). We performed a retrospective study using more than 100,000 records of patient appointments in a hospital outpatient clinic. Several machine learning algorithms were used for the development of our prediction models. We trained our models on a dataset that contained patients', physicians', and appointments' characteristics. Our feature set combines both unstudied features and features adopted from previous studies. In addition, we identified the influential features for predicting LOA and no-show. Our LOA model's performance was 6.92 in terms of MAE, and our no-show model's performance was 92.1% in terms of F-score. We compared our models' performance to the performance of previous research models by applying their methods to our dataset; our models demonstrated better performance. We show that the major effector of such differences is the use of our novel features. To evaluate the effect of our prediction results on the quality of schedules produced by appointment systems (AS), we developed an interface layer between our prediction models and the AS, where prediction results comprise the AS input. Using our prediction models, there was an 80% improvement in the daily cumulative patient waiting time and a 33% reduction in the daily cumulative physician idle time.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype:
        equations & formulas
        research
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      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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