Random Thoughts

Introduction In a previous post  I asserted that because medical appointments were so frequently late the providers of those services were rude (or trying to maximize their own revenue) and that with better planning these appointments could be on-time way more often. Given the subject matter I should have anticipated a lot of resistance to these ideas and flushed out the statistics behind scheduling but I didn't. This post attempts to rectify that short-coming and will dig into the details of scheduling and why I believe the current methods of scheduling medical appointments is not optimal. In a Perfect World... Some of the criticism of my first approach was that "healthcare deals with people, not numbers", "each patient is different" and "there is no way to predict which patients will require more time". It seems I was being accused of thinking that medical appointments could be analyzed and suddenly they would all take exactly the same amount of

My Experience For a good portion of the last decade I rarely went to the doctor and I rarely had any encounters with the medical system at all. That of course changed when my wife, Stephanie, became pregnant with twins almost 4 years ago and now that we are close to having our third child I have had lots of recent encounters with the system. The reason I'm writing this post though is that I have become frustrated by how often a medical appointment time appears to be a very loose guideline (and never in a good way) for when you will actually get beyond the waiting room. Just last week our ultrasound appointment was 45 minutes behind schedule and two weeks before that the Obstetrician was over 60 minutes late for a 10 am appointment... Why Being Late is Rude I was hoping to find a solid link for this section that clearly explained why being late is rude but that turned out to be harder than I expected. It seems that most articles I could find take the fact that being late is r