REDUCING THE REGISTRATION WAITING TIME OF WALK-IN PATIENTS AT POLYCLINICS

Abstract

With building owners in Singapore’s public healthcare sector procuring intelligent systems, healthcare workers enjoy greater efficiency while patients receive better service. A large number of Singapore’s elderly utilise polyclinics for their medical needs and with this population increasing in future, improvements have to be made quickly but more has yet to be done. An improved registration system, called the Smart Registration System (SRS), is introduced and it aims to reduce the waiting times walk-in patients experience, thereby indirectly maximising the space in polyclinics. The objectives of the study include • Studying the limitations of the existing registration process, • Establishing the need for improving the registration system of a walk-in patient, • Evaluating the feasibility of SRS, and • Developing the technical design of SRS To meet these objectives, literature review, a site visit to Choa Chu Kang Polyclinic (CCKP), a survey with walk-in patients, and a Monte Carlo simulation for CCKP were conducted. The site visit and the survey established the need to improve the existing registration system while the Monte Carlo simulation demonstrated that the average waiting time experienced by a walk-in patient can be reduced with SRS. Simple designs are used for the solutions of SRS and they cater to the different needs of patients. SRS consists of • Individual solutions o Registering to obtain queue number: online registration, push-pull SMS registration service, Self-Registration Kiosk/Service Selection Kiosk o Gathering of queue information: push-pull SMS, Teletext, S.M.I.L.E./Queue Watch • All-in-one solution o Smartphone application Implementing SRS in CCKP thus appears to be feasible and it allows for a reduction in the size of the registration area. Should SRS be used in other polyclinics, they may also be able to reap the same benefits as CCKP.