Machine Learning for Predicting Patient Wait Times and Appointment Delays

Being able to accurately predict waiting times and scheduled appointment delays can increase patient satisfaction and enable staff members to more accurately assess and respond to patient flow. In this work, the authors studied the applicability of machine learning models to predict waiting times at a walk-in radiology facility (radiography) and delay times at scheduled radiology facilities (CT, MRI, and ultrasound). In the proposed models, a variety of predictors derived from data available in the radiology information system were used to predict waiting or delay times. Several machine-learning algorithms, such as neural network, random forest, support vector machine, elastic net, multivariate adaptive regression splines, k-th nearest neighbor, gradient boosting machine, bagging, classification and regression tree, and linear regression, were evaluated to find the most accurate method. The elastic net model performed best among the 10 proposed models for predicting waiting times or delay times across all four modalities. The most important predictors were also identified.