ZAN Project Overview

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PROJECT OVERVIEW

PROJECT FINDINGS

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

DOCUMENTATION

ABOUT US

Motivation

In Progress

Secondary Research

With reference from several research papers, our secondary findings would be the following:

• Younger patients are significantly less likely to keep their initial outpatient mental health appointments
• No-show behavior is positively correlated with lower income and lower socioeconomic status
• Previous appointment experience of the patient, such as number of previous appointments, their types and lead times, do play a part in a patient defaulting his or her appointment
• The longer a patient has to wait for an appointment to be scheduled, the less likely is the patient to keep his or her first appointment

Objective & Goals

The objectives of the project would be the following:

1. Analysis of Hospital X's inpatients data
   • To understand the data domains
   • To understand the workflow of scheduling a patient’s consultation process
   • To identify the contributing factors that lead patients to defaulting appointments
   • To conduct what-if analyses to understand changes in appointment rates if the patient is referred to a medical professional nearer to them
   • To evaluate the feasibility of creating a predictive model
2. Recommendations based on findings
   • To help stakeholders understand the analysis of the findings
   • To consider the feasibility of a visual aid such as dashboard to aid in the stakeholders' future reference

Provided Data

The dataset is based on Hospital X's child and adolescent department inpatient records. The inpatient records are processed by the hospital staff working on the front desk. The patient visits are mainly categorised into 1) first appointment with a doctor, 2) review appointment with a doctor, 3) first appointment with a psychologist and 4) reviewed appointment with a psychologist.

Methodology

As we have not obtained the data until the NDA is signed, we will only share our initial thought process of how we will tackle the project. We shall adopt closely to the Data Analytics Lifecycle approach.

Prior to obtaining the actual data, we have been researching on the project topic to familiarise ourselves with the field domain and to understand the perspectives of the various stakeholders. We identified doctors, hospital frontline staff, patients who defaulted their appointments, patients who are unable to book an appointment due to no slots and Hospital X as the relevant stakeholders in this project.

At this phase of the project, we will focus on understanding the given dataset and clean the data. Concurrently, we will decide on the analytical model and prepare the data accordingly.

Project Scope

While the project will revolve around the above objectives, our project sponsor is flexible to allow us to explore other possible relevant analytical tools or techniques that would enhance the findings.

1. The dataset is limited to records from 2015 to 2016, which prevent any seasonal or yearly analysis
2. The dataset only pertains to our project sponsor’s department, which administers only younger patients of ages 18 years and below.