Electronic Visits in Primary Care: Modeling, Analysis, and Scheduling Policies

Abstract

Primary care, the backbone of the nation's healthcare system, is at the risk of collapse. Patients are dissatisfied due to poor access to care, and physicians are unhappy and burning out with an enormous amount of tasks. To improve the primary care access, many healthcare organizations have introduced electronic visits (or e-visits) to provide patient-physician communications through securing messages. In this paper, we introduce an analytical model to study e-visits in primary care clinics. Analytical formulas to evaluate the mean and variance of the patient length of visit in primary care clinics with e-visits are derived. System properties are investigated. In addition, comparisons of different scheduling policies between the office and the e-visits are carried out. The first come first serve, preemptive-resume, and non-preemptive policies are studied and the results show that the first come first serve policy typically leads to the best performance.

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