Regulating patient care in walk-in clinics

This paper studies the problem of government intervention in walk-in clinics regarding patient satisfaction. Since walk-in clinics benefit from the number of patients they serve (fee-for-service), it may be in their best interest to reduce the visit times; consequently, patient care and quality of service may be sacrificed to gain more revenue. For this matter, a walk-in clinic as a queuing system with stochastic arrival and visit times is studied. To identify the cases when the quality of service is compromised for maximizing clinic’s revenue and therefore government intervention may be required, we compare revenue maximization policies and patient satisfaction maximization policies under various scenarios defined based on the proportion of the arriving patients to the clinic’s capacity and also the existence of local competition. It is concluded that if patients’ arrival rate is relatively small compared to the clinic’s capacity, regulation is not required. Otherwise, a regulation in the form of minimum visit time can increase patient satisfaction.