Increased Time between Scheduling Date and Appointment Date Results in Increased No-Show Rates in the Academic Urology Practice.

Abstract

No-show appointments can weigh heavily on a urology practice's finances and productivity. Our objective was to investigate if a relationship existed between lag time and no-show appointments at the Columbia University Medical Center department of urology. We queried adult new patient appointments from July 2017 to July 2018 and excluded rescheduled or cancelled visits. We organized appointments by subspecialty training/practice of the urologist (general urology, voiding dysfunction/female urology, male sexual dysfunction/infertility, urological oncology, endourology and reconstructive urology). We performed logistic regression analysis to determine the relationship between lag time and no-show rate. We did the same for age and gender. We also organized lag time into 4 categories (less than 3 days, 3 to 7 days, 8 to 14 days, more than 14 days) and performed a goodness of fit test for no-show rates. A total of 6,060 new patient appointments were scheduled from July 2017 to July 2018. The no-show rate was 14.3% (865 patients). Each daily increase in lag time resulted in a 2% rise in the odds of no-shows for the overall practice (OR 1.02). There were similar results for sexual dysfunction (OR 1.03), general urology (OR 1.02), oncology (OR 1.02) and voiding dysfunction (OR 1.01). There was a positive correlation with increasing lag time category and no-show rates for all subspecialties (R2 >0.80) except reconstructive urology (R2=0.68). Each increase in age resulted in a 2% rise in the odds of no-shows (OR 0.98). Lag time for new patient visits is highly correlated with no-show rates, with a 2% rise in the odds of a no-show with each daily increase in lag time. Increasing age also demonstrated a correlation with no-show rates. Practice interventions to reduce lag time will hopefully reduce no-show rates.