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Why Your Doctor Never Sees You on Time
- minimaxir 11y ago24 points in 10 minutes? If you're asking people to upvote, don't.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- angersock 11y agoOut of curiosity, I wonder if anyone else remembers seeing docs ten years ago? Twenty? Thirty or more? I have this suspicion things are worse than they used to be--for example, being unable to even schedule an appointment for a physical without health insurance--but that's just my own perspective.
- skhann2 11y agoI am literally reading this in the waiting room right now haha how ironic!! Great article!
- sean_k 11y agoA clear reason why hospitals need to hire more data scientists--when will they realize their old school methods just aren't sustainable anymore?
- TheCoelacanth 11y agoHow do privacy laws like HIPPA impact this approach? Can all of the raw data needed to make this work be accessed or is some of it held back by privacy laws?
- saagrawa 11y agoYes the raw data required is completely independent of any PII and fully HIPAA compliant. So for example a hospital using Epic or Cerner or other EMR scheduling and just provide a clean list of historical appointment times and lengths, no names or dates or other such data needed. So the approach is fully HIPPA compliant requiring no sensitive patient info needed. The data set is used to forecast future volumes and apply operational constraints (nurse / doctor / waiting room schedules) to create optimized templates for furture appointments
- jvilalta 11y agoI'm not sure I understand how solving this particular problem is different from solving say, the scheduling of production at a manufacturing plant or at a custom fabricator. It's been a while since I went through queuing theory and simulation but it seems more of a straightforward statistics and operations problem rather than something to be solved with "big data". It seems like this has been solved in other industries, so isn't it just a matter of applying the expertise in manufacturing and applying it to hospitals?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- saagrawa 11y agoYes, in a way that is correct from a high-level understanding. However, there are nuanced pieces to the problem that requires data science such as the randomness of each process - patients and doctors are not widgets and they vary in behavior significantly. In a manufacturing plant, each process has the exact same duration every time but in a hospital setting, the same process can be different for Patient A vs Patient B due to a variety of reasons. In fact even in manufacturing facilities, they are starting to use big data and advanced data science themselves to solve their operational problems and get smarter at forecasting, predicting, etc.