We all know the “three months to see dermatology” problem.
The frustrating part is that these delays often get explained as a pure capacity issue. “We need more dermatologists, more clinic slots, more everything.” And yes, capacity matters. But this NEJM Catalyst paper shows something more interesting: a lot of the delay is also a sorting problem.
At Penn Medicine, dermatology used a decision tree to route new patients into acute, subacute, or routine appointment blocks. No new physicians. No new clinics. No major staffing expansion.
Wait times fell dramatically. But the model also raises the bigger question of whether rule-based scheduling can actually scale across the messy reality of outpatient medicine…
👉 Full breakdown in my latest Huddle+ article here.
