DA 8: Review the following news items to motivate your discussion.

Scheduling in Healthcare Settings

For your discussion, I am attaching links to two news articles from Wall Street Journal: the first one titled ‘The Informed Patient’ discusses scheduling in hospital ORs for surgeons. The second one titled ‘The Doctor Will See You Eventually’ discusses open-access scheduling for patients in family physician’s office and provides insights on scheduling best-practices in healthcare setting. Provide your opinion on what your learned from it in context of implications for scheduling in healthcare operations.

News Item 1: The Informed Patient (clicking this link will download the article as a PDF file)

News Item 2: The Doctor Will See You Eventually (clicking this link will download the article as a PDF file)

This is my friends post(Sample post)

Waiting in the emergency room for hours is extremely frustrating, especially because you went there for an emergency reason. Some conditions can get worse if it is not treated quickly enough. Time is extremely important for the patient, doctor, and the nurse. If a child has an allergic reaction and the parents go to the emergency room just to find out they have to wait for hours until the child is seen by the doctor, they may burst in anger and slow processes down even more.

Changing workflow to become more time efficient has been a large problem in hospitals for years. Applying these new systems in the hospital workplace, as written on the article, allows more patients to be seen, reduce wait times, and has shown to be more profitable for the hospitals. If one hospital seems unreliable to a patient, they will cancel appointments with that one and find a different one. By placing better systems in the workplace, the hospital is able to better manage and retain their patients. I think this is a great improvement for the whole country. Reducing wait times reduces anxiety for each patient and provides a feeling of safety.

I remember years ago whenever I went to the emergency room, I would have to wait for hours for what only ended up taking 10 minutes. Recently, when I visited he emergency room for my sister, no one was waiting in the emergency room. My sister was able to see a nurse instantly upon arrival. The implementation of the more efficient system is clearly visible for the patients who visit the hospitals. I went in expecting to spend 3-4 hours in the hospital, but when I arrived in the emergency room, I felt instant relief.

Hospitals are definitely improving their systems. Because the articles were written over 5 years ago, I can tell many hospitals have been continuously looking to improve to speed up processes within the workplace. The nurses look less stressed, patients are less anxious, and hospitals have claimed to see financial benefits.