Optimising patient revisit intervals for virtual and office appointments in chronic care

Abstract

Virtual appointments are cost-effective alternatives to the traditional office appointments where patients receive the required care remotely. Virtual appointments are used to complement or substitute for office appointments due to the limitations on the availability of office appointments. They improve patients' access to care and provide convenient care for the patients. However, it is challenging to integrate these appointments with traditional appointments and to decide the visit frequency of patients for different types of appointments since these appointments have different effectiveness. In this paper, we consider a clinic that provides both virtual and office appointments in a chronic care setting. We develop an open migration network to simulate the patients' flow in the clinic system and build mathematical models to investigate the optimal follow-up rates (i.e., revisit intervals) for both virtual and office appointments. With the model developed, more systematic decisions can be made to determine follow-up rates.