30 terms from Chilean clinic operations, defined with the operational consequence attached

Why fix the vocabulary at all?

Half an hour of an operations meeting goes into discovering that two people use the same word for different things. Referral means one thing to the doctor who issues it and another to the person who books it. Missed appointment and no-show circulate as synonyms until someone has to report, and then it turns out each one has a different denominator.

Fixing the vocabulary is the cheap part of any completion project and the part almost nobody does before starting. This glossary exists because we needed one: when the result you promise is measured in orders completed, every term in the contract has to mean exactly one thing. The conversation about what gets measured and against what takes twenty minutes instead of two meetings when the 30 words are defined up front.

What does each entry contain?

Three parts. A one-line definition you can paste into meeting minutes, an explanation of how the term is used inside a Chilean centre, and the operational consequence. Appointment slot is a space on the calendar, and also the unit of capacity lost when the patient does not show. Network leakage names the exam your network ordered and another provider ended up billing.

The longest entries are no-show, unmanaged referral and patient harassment, because all three carry an operational decision behind them and all three get argued at the table before anything is signed.

How is this glossary meant to be used?

Three ways. Before a meeting with a vendor: if someone uses denominator without telling you which one, the right follow-up question is already written here. While building an internal report, so that completion rate means the same thing across all five units. And for the new scheduler two weeks in who still does not know what a call disposition is.

Vocabulary is free and we give all of it away. What matters is that the market argue about order completion in precise terms, because precise terms let you ask the hard questions. The ones we get asked are answered on another page, with the same standard.