BOOKS OF RtfiDIfGS - PAHO/WHO

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8. Consider relieving medical secretaries of appointmentmaking
duties, where feasible.
9. Define more clea.J'y lines of responsibility and control of
clerical staff to avoid conflicting directives.
Scheduling-related recommendLa'ions
1. Consider providing, at .ach heavy consultative load desk,
scheduled "standby" time on a rotating basis, to take up
urgent consults without overloading any one doctor. This
could be accomplished by having at least one physician at
all times performing some clinic functiorns which could be
easily interrupted.
2. Based on historical data, consider devising a battery of lab
andlor X-ray studies which result from some percentage
(say 80% or 90%) of physicals for a given doctor or department.
3. At the doctor's discretion, consider prescheduling the
above lab and/or X ray studies prior to the patient's appointment
for a physical with sufficient lead-time to allow
for processing, reporting and delivery of results to the doctor.
6
4. When historical data indicates that certain appointment
types with a given doctor, inevitably or to a large extent,
are followed by some other appointment, either with the
same doctor or elsewhere in the clinic, then consider prescheduling
the latter as well.
5. Consider storage of specimens for some prescribed period
of time in the laboratory. The inconveniences caused by
additional visits to the laboratory will be avoided. This
would be especially useful for prescheduled patients.
6. Consider a patient standby list. The patients in this list
should be easily reached and would help to alleviate the
problem of no-show and late cancellation appointment
slots going unfilled.
'As a first attempt to identify which further appointments result from physical appointmnents.
studies were run in each department to determine how many of each type of
consult, X-ray tests, laboratory tests, and special studies were ordered over two-week
periods. The results of these studies are displayed in Table 1.
REISMAN, DA SILVA, MANTELL 1 Systems