Why full schedules run late
Booking a patient every 15 minutes for visits that average 15 minutes fills the day exactly, on paper. In practice some visits run long and some short. A short visit leaves the provider idle for a few minutes that can't be saved. A long visit pushes back everyone booked after it. Over a morning those delays add up, and they reset only when there's a gap: the lunch hour or the end of the day.
That's why an office can have the right number of appointment slots and still run 30 minutes behind by mid-afternoon. The template leaves no room for the variation every clinic has.
The levers
- Booking interval. Booking a little slower than the average visit time leaves room to recover. It costs a few slots a day.
- Buffer slots. One open slot mid-morning and mid-afternoon catches up delays before they reach the end of the session.
- The lunch hour. A provider on duty through a closed booking hour absorbs overruns from the morning.
- Visit types. New patients, procedures and follow-ups take different times. Booking them at the same interval builds in delay.
- No-shows and double-booking. No-shows open gaps; double-booking fills them. Too much double-booking on a day with few no-shows is how offices fall furthest behind.
Each lever trades provider idle time against patient wait. The right setting depends on your visit times, how much they vary and how many patients you book.
Mixing in walk-ins
Offices that also take walk-ins have both problems at once: a template that fills the day and arrivals that don't follow it. If walk-ins make up much of your volume, model the office as a walk-in clinic instead. See urgent care and walk-in clinic staffing.
Modeling an office in QSimHealth
- Choose the appointment office facility type.
- Enter the patients you book each hour, with zero for hours you don't book, such as lunch.
- Enter providers on duty by hour and the average visit time, with how much it varies.
- Run a simulated year, save the scenario, change the booking rate or a buffer hour, and compare.
For teaching
Appointment templates are a good first exercise in operations courses: the trade between idle time and waiting is easy to see and easy to argue about. Students and faculty can use QSimHealth free for 10 days with a .edu email, with more time for a class or research on request. See QSimHealth for educators.