Practical, step-by-step approaches for healthcare teams to measure, analyze, and reduce patient wait times across clinical and administrative settings.
Welcome — How this resource helps you reduce patient wait times. If you and your team are frustrated by long waits, schedule chaos, or unpredictable throughput, this resource is designed to get you unstuck and moving toward measurable improvements. Reducing waits isn't about a single magic fix; it's about measuring...
Wait Time Measurement & Definitions — get a reliable baseline. Good improvement begins with clear measurement. Different teams call "wait time" different things; if you don't agree on the exact start and end points, numbers will mislead. This guide gives practical definitions, recommended core metrics, and measurement...
Root Cause & Bottleneck Analysis for Wait Times. After you have a baseline, the next high-value step is to find where waits actually form and why. This deep dive gives practical methods—fast mapping techniques, simple queuing thinking, and structured questions—to identify bottlenecks you can test against. Step 1 — Map...
Designing a Simple Wait Time Dashboard and KPIs for Daily Huddles. A compact, reliable dashboard connects measurement to action. The goal is not to show every metric but to highlight the few numbers that tell whether flow is healthy, where help is needed, and whether experiments are succeeding. Principles for an...
Example (composite): How a community clinic used measurement, experiments, and huddles to cut waits. Note: This is an anonymized, composite example designed to illustrate how the measurement-to-experiment loop commonly plays out. It synthesizes patterns seen in multiple improvement efforts rather than reporting a...
Facilitator guide and workshop agenda to map patient flow and identify root causes of delays.