How long do you wait to see a doctor? When an epidemic breaks out, how fast can government health officials assess and decide the next course of action? Most importantly, what can health care personnel do to tackle these questions?

Traditionally, medical school emphasized on medical competency. Because of this, it has resulted in doctors who know their stuff, but it has not touched so much on improving the health care experience as a whole.

It must be noted that to the patient, reporting sick is not just about seeing the doctor. It also encompasses a lot more details such as the ambiance of the clinic, the customer service level provided and so on.

Most doctors do not have much experience in dealing with mass casualties, save for a few exceptions, such as military doctors and those involved in treating infectious diseases. Thus, there is little incentive for doctors in private clinics to further improve the flow of patients, when they are busy with treating them.

When we apply a logistic framework to this context, it is possible to dissect the entire consultation process (from admitting the patient to outpatient care) into smaller steps, and then experts evaluate the efficiency of each step (i.e. what could have been further improved).

Using logistic solutions, all the small steps will then be further improved, and hence wastage of the patient's time will be significantly reduced.

As a result, more patients are treated; they are satisfied with their experience, and medical expertise has not been compromised at all.

Mentioned below are three innovative ideas that have been suggested for adoption.

"Mystery shopper" programme

No patient doubts the competency of their doctor, but not all can claim to be satisfied with the health care experience that they received from the clinics.

From making an appointment to outpatient treatment, the entire process is under heavy scrutiny from the patients themselves. Patients nowadays are not concerned with just seeing the doctor; if the nurse has a bad attitude, it may discourage the patient from seeing the doctor for a second time.

The ethics council of the American Medical Association (AMA) has suggested doctors to adopt the use of undercover patients, to test the level of health care experience that their patients received.

In short, these "mystery shoppers" are paid to fake certain illnesses to evaluate the type of inpatient care and treatment that was provided to them.

This approach is obviously controversial, as fake patients may deny true patients of their consultation time. However, it does serve as an effective way to evaluate customer service level in clinics.

Cell phone tracking

When an infectious disease breaks out in the neighbourhood, tracking down who had been in contact with the patients is extremely difficult, and it could take days before health officials have any results.

Thus, Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College London, has suggested that in countries which have a high mobile phone penetration rate such as Singapore, it may be more effective to track people down through their call log.

The idea may sound new, but to logistic experts, tracking down their designated warehouses and contacts through Global Positioning System (GPS) and other forms of real-time data collection system in their cell phones is already the norm.

Using of electronic health records

It's an old joke, but everyone knows no one except the nurse and the doctor knows what's the doctor scribbling. In the past, the patient's health records were written by hand on paper. As expected, there were several shortcomings to this method, such as the doctor's style of writing and natural wear and tear of the records.

This may sound like a surprise, but fewer than one in five of US doctors have started to record their patient's information digitally. The reason is because doctors in small practices feel unmotivated to change their records to digital platforms due to the financial costs. However, it has been proven that electronic records are able to reduce operating cost and improve patient care for clinics.

Fortunately, the US government recently announced a US$150 million Medicare project that will offer doctors to invest in electronic records. Hopefully, this will result in better storage of patient's data other than writing it on paper.

Conclusion

This report is not to say that medical competency is no longer important; it must still be main priority for trainee doctors. However, they must realise that being a doctor is not just about giving the best treatment to patients. It should also be about making sure that the patient feels happy on seeing the doctor, and not having his feelings being dampened by unnecessary paperwork and wasting of the patient's time.