How do you track average wait times per doctor, per day?

The two times that matter

A patient's wait for a doctor is the time between arriving and that doctor starting the consultation. Everything else is detail, but three details decide whether the number means anything:

• Arrival is when the patient checked in, not when they booked. For booked patients, keep the appointment time too, so an early arrival can be told apart from a late doctor.
• A patient seen by two doctors waits twice. The wait for the second doctor starts when the first consultation ended, and belongs to the second doctor's line.
• The start is when the consultation began, not when the patient was called. A call that nobody answers is not the end of the wait.

Doing it by hand

It can be done with a log sheet at the desk: one row per patient, with the ticket number, the doctor, the arrival time, the time they went in, and the time they came out. At the end of the day, subtract, group by doctor and average.

It works for a week, and that is its weakness. The busiest hour is exactly when nobody has time to write, so the log is most incomplete where the wait is worst. Use it to find out whether there is a problem, not to run the clinic on.

Reading the numbers

An average per doctor per day is where to start, not where to stop.

• Count the long waits, not only the average. How many patients waited more than 30 minutes — the limit most often cited — or more than an hour says more than a mean.
• Put the wait beside the consultation time. A doctor whose patients wait long because each consultation runs long is a different problem from a doctor whose line is simply longer than the next one.
• Compare the same doctor across days before comparing doctors with each other. Doctors seeing different kinds of patients will not have the same numbers, and should not.
• Look by hour. Most clinics do not have a slow day; they have a slow hour, and the fix for ten o'clock is not the fix for four.

Ways to track it

The methods differ mostly in who does the recording, and whether it still happens on the busiest day.

Which hours of the day are busiest?

Count arrivals by the hour patients checked in, not by appointment time, because walk-ins and late arrivals are exactly what makes an hour busy. Then compare the same weekday across several weeks: one day's peak can be an accident, but the same peak four Tuesdays running is a pattern worth staffing for.

Busy is not the same as slow. An hour with many arrivals that a second doctor absorbs is fine; an hour that leaves patients waiting past your limit is the one to fix.

Which numbers to review for each doctor at the end of the day

Two numbers per doctor, read together: the average wait before that doctor started with a patient, and the average length of that doctor's consultations. A long wait with short consultations points at the size of the line or the order it was worked in; a long wait with long consultations points at the schedule.

Add how many patients waited more than an hour that day, and read each doctor against their own previous days before comparing them with anyone else.

How QueueCare tracks it

QueueCare records the check-in time of every patient and the start and end of every consultation, because those are the moments reception and the doctors already mark on the board. From them, the day's analytics show each doctor's average wait — from arrival, or from the end of the previous doctor's consultation — beside that doctor's average consultation time and how busy their room was.

The same screen charts how many patients arrived in each hour of the day, beside the clinic's average wait and how many patients waited more than an hour, and any past day can be opened to compare it with today.