A cost-effective urgent care policy to improve patient access in a dynamic scheduled clinic setting

Patient no‐show in outpatient clinics has been a long recognized issue, which negatively impacts clinic operational efficiency in terms of costs and patient access to care. One way to reduce these negative impacts is to allow urgent walk‐ins during a clinic day. Some clinics allow random walk‐ins and some purposely leave open time slots to accommodate them. The objective of this paper is to develop a cost‐effective urgent care policy that is added on top of a full schedule and takes into account scheduled patients’ no‐show rates to improve patient access to care in a dynamic clinic environment. The findings indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the current random and urgent slot approaches. This paper demonstrates a dynamic approach for accommodating urgent patients into a patient scheduling system, based on the prediction of an individual patient's no‐show probability and the maximum number of urgent patients allowed.