
Why Your Doctor Never Sees You on Time - ceekay
https://medium.com/@saagrawa/the-googol-reasons-your-doctor-never-sees-you-on-time-958fb25d58da
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saagrawa
Yes, 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.

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saagrawa
Yes 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

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jvilalta
I'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?

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angersock
Out 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.

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skhann2
I am literally reading this in the waiting room right now haha how ironic!!
Great article!

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TheCoelacanth
How 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?

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sean_k
A clear reason why hospitals need to hire more data scientists--when will they
realize their old school methods just aren't sustainable anymore?

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minimaxir
24 points in 10 minutes?

If you're asking people to upvote, don't.

