Texting: Bane in the Classroom, Boon in the Waiting Room

The experience of spending two hours in a waiting room for five minutes with a physician is likely a familiar one for most Americans. The culprit responsible for the medical bottleneck is overbooking, a common profit maximizing strategy for those firms faced with low attendance rates looking to recoup revenue lost from no-show customers. Last minute cancellations result in lost revenue for the supplier when the unused spots cannot be filled.

According to the article entitled “IT Solution Saves Money by Helping Reduce Missed Appointments,” St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, Ireland faced a 23% “did not attend” (DNA) rate. Under these conditions, the hospital could not remain profitable without resorting to overbooking, a policy they eventually implemented at a rate of 5 appointments per 3 slots. In the case of the medical profession, the services provided are often so necessary that patients will not simply leave their appointment. However, the intangible yet costly aspect of denying a patient his or her time is the ill will on the part of the patient who must wait hours for an appointment he or she has made well in advance. Intangible costs of overbooking also include the stress of on the part of hospital personnel who must deal firsthand with angry patients. However, if the hospital maintains an insufficient overbooking rate, they will essentially be paying for physician, nursing, and clerical staff that are underutilized.

In response to the need to maintain patient satisfaction while efficiently meeting fiscal obligations, St. Vincent’s has implemented a messaging system in an effort to increase appointment attendance while simultaneously reducing the need for overbooking. The Defero messaging system sends automatic text messages to patients reminding them of upcoming appointments and is expected to reduce the DNA rate at the hospital by up to thirty percent. In this way, St. Vincent’s hopes to minimize the probability of under-booking through direct appeals to the customer while simultaneously improving customer and employee satisfaction. Hopefully, in the future, other industries will be able to take advantage of improving technology to develop innovative solutions to high cancellation rates without resorting to overbooking.

-Courtney Hayward, Laura Helsop, and Katie Tretter