Long wait times and no-shows are the twin headaches of outpatient scheduling—and here’s the irony: the two are connected.
The longer a patient waits for an appointment, the more likely they are to cancel or never show up at all. Add in that no-show rates spike at certain times of day and in certain patient groups, and you start to see the real operational drain this creates.
We’ve thrown the usual fixes at the problem—patient portals, reminder texts, overbooking—but the data tells a different story about where the biggest opportunity might be. It’s not just about reminding patients to come… it’s about rethinking how we build the schedule in the first place.
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