Study's solution to no-shows: overbooking

Examining a long-used travel industry practice, researchers found overbooking could be an efficient way to deal with the extra time created by patient no-shows.

By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. Feb. 4, 2008.

Just as airlines routinely overbook flights to ensure all seats on the planes are filled, some physicians could overbook their schedules to ensure that all the time slots in their schedules are filled, according to a recent study.

Two University of Colorado researchers published a study that shows how overbooking patients could increase practice productivity and reduce idle time caused when patients don't keep appointments. In January, the study won the 2007 Best Paper Award from Decision Sciences, an academic journal about operations management and decision-making within organizations.

The researchers developed a computerized simulation tool that runs analyses based on specific attributes of the practice, such as size, patient demographics and average length of appointments, to help determine when to overbook, and by how many patients, or if it's even feasible.

In many ways, practices already do this through "squeezing in" patients, said researchers Linda LaGanga, PhD, and Steve Lawrence, PhD.

"I think everyone's first reaction to overbooking in heath care is, 'That's got to be awful,' and we thought that, too," said Dr. Lawrence, an associate professor of operations management at the University of Colorado at Boulder Leeds School of Business. He is an adviser to Dr. LaGanga, who conducted the research for her dissertation as a PhD candidate and is now an instructor at Leeds. "But we knew it happened, so we wanted to see when benefits exceed the costs."