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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

"Can a Computer Replace Your Doctor? "

only if it's pre-programmed to be > 40 min late for each appointment

Seriously, what is the cause for this in American medicine? Every time I go in for something simple, I have to go through about 3 layers of administrative people before even a nurse practitioner sees me. I'd be really glad if I could interact with a computer-based system in the mean time.

The doctor starts on time. Patient one requires slightly more time than scheduled...repeat for other patients. Also doctors have other tasks than seeing patients: reviewing lab work (part of seeing patients?), pharmaceutical sales reps, signing paperwork, etc.

Automation would be nice, but not sure how you could remove all the time sinks in US Medicine.

/not a doctor, just observations as an end user.

and some patients miss appointments, and nobody plans to be ill so there are last-minute "squeeze-me-in" appointments, etc. etc. Some practices manage this much better than others though.

I think that is the more interesting question: why don't practices get better over time at managing this? There are places I go: hair salon, doctor, the vet that are always 30 minutes behind. As a one-off that makes sense, but as a pattern stretching over years it means they don't adapt to account for this. If, on average, appointments take 2 minutes longer than they think then change the appointment times to account for that. Do _something_.

It annoys me, as a process-oriented thinker, that so many offices never get better at handling average daily volumes.

Unexpected time-sinks are not unique to doctors.

Nor are delays in appointments.

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