Examination of a community health care organization\u27s patient scheduling: A preliminary study using logistic regression model

Missed appointments are one of the contributors to the waste of resources in not-for-profit community health care organizations. These organizations usually have fixed costs and variable revenues. In such setting maintaining a full day\u27s patient schedule is one of the critical responsibilities of the staff. In this paper we study the patient demographics of a not-for-profit community health center located in a semi-rural area to predict the probability of a patient not showing for their appointment. The capability to be able to predict no-shows would allow the patient scheduling system to utilize the available visit slots more efficiently. Our preliminary study indicates that such an approach does result in significant improvement in the number of patients seen during the day and increase the revenues without causing any increases in operational costs or patient waiting times