Dutch hospitals use AI to solve no-show patient problems that cost them millions

Many hospitals face the problem of patients not keeping their appointments or canceling them at the last minute. This represents a large loss of money. To combat the problem, hospitals in the Netherlands rely on reminder messages, by mail or by text messages. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also now being used to calculate which patients are most likely to cancel an appointment.

The UMC Groningen, for example, has up to 1.6 million appointments per year of which between 24,000 and 37,000 appointments have to be canceled. The reason; patients do not show up for the scheduled appointment. Appointments that were canceled at short notice were not included in this calculation.

"This is a problem that has been going on for a long time, at all hospitals," spokesperson Lex Kloosterman of the UMC Groningen told RTL Nieuws. "We have a lot of patients and appointments and that costs a lot of money. That's why we look at it critically."

Several million euros in costs are incurred by hospitals each year due to missed appointments, according to Kloosterman. In addition, the gap in the schedule caused by a patient's no-show is also an unused opportunity to help another patient.

To ensure there are fewer missed appointments, reminders are sent to patients. If patients fail to show up for their requested appointment more than twice, patients and their primary care physicians receive an official letter that they must reschedule the appointment themselves.

The Erasmus MC in Rotterdam has recently started using artificial intelligence in addition to the traditional methods to effectively prevent appointment cancellations. In doing so, the artificial intelligence checks who is most likely to miss an appointment based on 13 criteria, such as the patient's age, the distance between home and hospital, and the number of previous no-shows. As a result, the patients who are most likely to be no-shows receive a phone call.

And in fact, this represents a proven method, as since then the number of no-shows has dropped by 14.3 percent. For the Rotterdam hospital, this means cost savings and more than 6,000 outpatient visitors per year.