Waiting‐time estimation in walk‐in clinics

Abstract

Medical assistance is offered by walk-in clinics (WC). These clinics must keep track of patients' turn in line. Some private companies offer an extra follow-up service to WC patients, which notifies them when their consultation approaches, so patients can use their free time elsewhere than in the waiting room. This paper aims to develop an applied forecasting approach for consultation service time estimation and waiting-time estimation. A model based on particle filters and mixture models helps to estimate the waiting time for each consultation, using historical and new incoming data from patient consultations. The system considers two types of patients, namely, regular and follow-up. Our method gives an estimate of the waiting time for consultation better than simple statistics.

A Real-Time, Automatic, and Dynamic Scheduling and Control System for PET Patients Based on Wearable Sensors

“…. The proposed scheme should meet the following conditions: (1) real-time automatic scheduling: the system performs real-time automatic scheduling according to the patient registration time; (2) scheduling for different medicines: the system schedules the best inspection time according to the cycle time of different medicines; (3) dynamic update of prediction time: when a new patient checks in, or after the end of each examination task of the patient, the system immediately updates the expected prediction task time of each patient; (4) providing predictive inspection time immediately: the system provides the predicted inspection time to the medical staff, patients, and their families in real time; (5) automatic allocation of general and specific beds: the system automatically allocates suitable beds to patients waiting for beds according to all patients' inspection task completion status; (6) automatic detection of all patients' tasks periods: the system automatically detects the start time and end time of each examination task of all patients; (7) automatic detection and prediction of examination room conditions: automatic detection and prediction of the use and idle periods of each examination room; (8) instant rescheduling: the system automatically arranges patients who need to be rescanned.…”

“…Many scholars [ 8 , 9 , 10 ] proposed methods for outpatients to arrive at the scene close to the consultation time. Montecinos et al [ 8 ] used the method of particle filters to estimate the waiting time of consultation using historical data of patient visit time and new input data.…”

A Real-time Approach for Dynamic Scheduling Pet Activities in a Hospital

“…Many scholars [8][9][10] have proposed methods for outpatients to arrive at the scene close to the consultation time. Montecinos et al [8] used the method of particle filters to estimate the waiting time of consultation using historical data of patient visit time and new input data.…”

“…Many scholars [8][9][10] have proposed methods for outpatients to arrive at the scene close to the consultation time. Montecinos et al [8] used the method of particle filters to estimate the waiting time of consultation using historical data of patient visit time and new input data. Tantitharanukul et al [9] developed an estimated waiting time system WTE based on the queuing theory, and used the MQTT protocol to transfer the waiting time and number to the patient's cell phone.…”

“…Obulor et al [10] also used the queuing theory to develop an appointment queuing system to provide better resource utilization to solve the problem of long waiting times for patients. These studies [7][8][9][10] estimate the time for a single treatment, while the system proposed in this paper is for multi-stage treatment such as PET, and can dynamically estimate the start and end time of each different stage, and instantly announce these time information on the public screen or send it to the patient's mobile phone.…”