研究成果：Reducing Patient Tardiness: From Experiment to Implementation
作者：Wei Gu, Meng Li, Shichen Zhang
发表期刊：Production and Operations Management
发表时间：2025年9月
摘要：In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of late penalties in reducing patient tardiness. Specifically, we evaluate two types of penalties: the last-place penalty (i.e., assigning late-arriving patients to the end of the queue) and the fixed-place penalty (i.e., moving late patients back by a fixed number of positions), under two conditions—absence of a time recommendation and presence of an explicit time recommendation. We conducted a randomized controlled trial involving 9,573 patient visits at a partner hospital in Asia. Our findings indicate that the fixed-place penalty has no significant impact on patient tardiness. In contrast, the last-place penalty significantly reduces patients’ late rate and encourages earlier arrival, particularly when no time recommendation is provided. When combined with a time recommendation, the last-place penalty continues to lower the late rate but does not further shift arrival times earlier. We also find that the last-place penalty is effective in increasing the patient’s compliance with the time recommendation. We further implemented the last-place penalty in the partner hospital across a broader dataset involving 61,829 visits, yielding consistent results.