Patient wait time has long been a recognized problem §in modern outpatient health care delivery systems. §Despite all the efforts to develop appointment rules §and solutions, the problem of long patient waits §persists. Regardless of the reasons for this §problem, the fact remains that there are few §implemented models for effective scheduling that §consider patient wait times as well as physician §idle time and are generalized sufficiently to §accommodate a variety of outpatient health care §settings. This book presents a solution for the §scheduling of procedures and appointments of any §given facility that both patient wait time and §physician idle time meet the declared scheduling §policies. Furthermore, this book provides the §implementation results from three case studies to §support the approach. The implementations confirm §that the system can effectively reduce patient wait §time as much as 56% without significantly increasing §physician idle time per patient.