Glossary
What scheduling means in a health network
Work out what was asked for.
Translate the name the physician wrote into the service that exists in that site's catalogue.
Find where it is performed.
Each service exists at some sites and not others, with rules of its own per machine, per clinician and sometimes per patient age.
Make the day fit together.
If the patient has several orders, the point is that they ask for one day off work instead of three.
Hand over the preparation.
Fasting, days of diet, medication to pause, documents to bring: what decides whether the exam can go ahead on arrival.
Why does hiring more people not shorten the queue?
AHRQ's CAHPS Ambulatory Care Improvement Guide traces appointment delay to an imbalance between the demand for visits and the supply of clinician time. On the supply side the bottleneck is not only the number of hands. Each site's rules live in the team's memory and in personal notebooks, so a new hire takes weeks to produce unsupervised. Large teams and small teams end up with the same queue, which is the whole argument in hiring more schedulers versus automating.
Scheduling is also where attendance is decided. An appointment offered without confirmation takes a slot and creates a problem downstream. An appointment booked with the prep handed over and confirmation requested holds on its own.