Automated appointment system to facilitate medical-care management.

Abstract

clinic of the future should strive to provide a one-to-one doctor-patient relationship, continuity of care, an effective appointment system, and a dignified setting. It is the purpose of this paper to focus on an effective appointment system, and to describe the practical steps taken, and the reasoning behind these steps, to develop an automated appointment system for a medium-sized clinic (55,000 visits per year), which can serve as a foundation for patient-care management. Sussman et al. have documented the need to balance patient waiting time with doctor idle time. Appointment systems which permit long patient waits may adversely affect the level of patient care by forcing the conscientious physician to hurry the care provided each patient in order to lessen the