Enhancing outpatient clinics management software by reducing patients' waiting time

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Health Informatics
• Operations Research

Background:

• Long patient waiting times in outpatient clinics negatively impact patient satisfaction and service quality.
• The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) prioritizes enhancing healthcare service quality, including outpatient services.
• Global examples demonstrate successful wait time reduction strategies in outpatient clinics.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the Outpatient Management Software (OMS) in KSA healthcare settings.
• To identify key factors contributing to long patient waiting times.
• To propose and evaluate software-based solutions for reducing outpatient waiting times.

Main Methods:

• Employed quantitative and qualitative research methods.
• Investigated current OMS functionalities and patient satisfaction levels.
• Identified five critical issues: appointment type, ticket numbering, doctor late arrival, early arriving patients, and patient distribution lists.
• Mapped identified problems to OMS components and proposed solutions.
• Evaluated solutions through analytical methods and simulation experiments.

Main Results:

• Implemented solutions demonstrated significant reductions in patient waiting times.
• Addressing late doctor arrivals reduced clinic service time by up to 20%.
• Solutions for early arriving patients decreased vital time by 53.3% and total waiting time by 30.3%.
• Optimized patient distribution lists improved efficiency by 54.2%.

Conclusions:

• Enhancing Outpatient Management Software is an effective strategy to reduce patient waiting times in KSA clinics.
• Software improvements directly correlate with increased patient satisfaction and overall healthcare quality.
• The study provides actionable, software-centric solutions for improving outpatient clinic operations.