“Intelligent” Systems and Their Reliance On Human Intervention
- *DISCLAIMER*: I am in no way saying that the ideas presented here have been proven or are superior to the appointment systems we have today. This paper is merely for discussion purposes and mostly from a technical standpoint. The ideas presented here could possibly be limited (somewhat) as not much consideration have been taken as to how such a system will fare in possibly more vast and complex concepts like different legalistic landscape, political structures etc.
OVERVIEW: In today’s pandemic, the use of appointment systems be it for meeting your doctor, restaurant reservations have become commonplace as our lives become increasingly digitalized. These appointment systems as good as they may be, sometimes get on my nerves as waiting times for them are inaccurate and one has to wait longer than expected for their turn. Apart from such personal experiences, I believe restaurants / food businesses too face a certain level of frustration from “no-shows” (when customers do not arrive even when they are supposed to). These “no-shows” turn out to be costly especially when the inflow of customers from “walk-ins” are low (potentially exacerbated by the pandemic where people may feel safer to be at home).
Why?
I believe this is due to 3 main reasons:
Reason 1: All you need is 1 person to appear late for their appointments / bookings and the rest of the timings below that person will slide.
Reason 2: I mean people CAN cancel their bookings if they want to but what if they DO NOT cancel their bookings / appointments on time for whatever reason? (too busy, hence forgot to etc.) Miscommunication here leads to loss of time and booking timings may slide.
Reason 3: Even IF people do cancel their bookings on time, there are time lags due to human reaction time from at least 2 parties — a) Organization’s administration team needs time to recognize the empty slots and find patients or customers to fill them up, b) new customer or patient who has been called up to fill that open slot will have to take some time to re-evaluate his / her current schedule before making a decision — which can delay those people having appointments later.
My solution to this will be to create an “Automated Appointment System” which aims to solve the above 3 challenges faced by most modern appointment systems today. As appointment systems vary much from industry to industry, I will only be speaking broadly on how such systems can change.
Firstly: An automated check (can be through a message / email) can be done by this new system on a person “some time” or from time-to-time before the person’s appointment as to whether or not he / she is truly able to come for the appointment. (how long exactly is “some time” requires more research but otherwise, enough time should be given for the new customer or patient to be informed of this slot opening and sufficient time for that person to make a decision based on this new information) Whether or not this person responds promptly to this check(s) will determine whether the person is coming for the appointment / booking. (For e.g. if a person does not respond to these checks / confirmations that he / she is going for her bookings, his / her bookings will be automatically cancelled by the system. This aims to accommodate those who have busy schedules and forgot to cancel their bookings.)
Secondly: Apart from today’s booking systems where a person can only book 1 time slot / appointment at a time, in this new system, a person should be given a “second option” (possibly his / her preferred option for a booking or appointment but unfortunately has already been booked by others). This will mean that if the old booker for that time slot decides that he / she is no longer able to go for that booking, this system will automatically assign this time slot to the person who have selected this time slot to be his / her “second option”.
Thirdly: It should be accessible enough for one to cancel their booking and one should be aware of such a possibility (be it via email etc.) so that for those who are not as busy, they will hopefully be pro-active enough to cancel their bookings on time.
That is all to this “Automated Appointment System” I have in mind. If you would like to see the source code for this project or contribute any ideas or thoughts to this project, you could do them here! I am happy to hear them :)
Thank you for reading~
Going back to the heading — “Intelligent” Systems and Their Reliance On Human Intervention — I feel that systems are only as “intelligent” or “knowledgeable” insofar as the users of the system provide it with sufficient knowledge to take well-informed action. In the case of “Appointment Systems”, if its users do not let the system know that he / she is no longer able to come for a certain booking, the system will not have full information of the current situation and will be unable to act in the best interest of humans. In this case, not letting the administration team know soon enough that there is an empty slot or that a person will be coming late and hence should be rearranged to another date or timing, causing the rest of the bookings for that day to be delayed. Taking today’s approach of having a human administration team to ensure that waiting times for customers / patients are kept to reasonable durations and that food businesses / restaurants have as little no-shows as possible is possible but may be difficult due to time lags brought by human reaction time etc. However, one cannot understate the importance of humans providing the necessary human-touch in the equation especially in industries like medicine where human trust and the warmth of the human voice can go a long way. The idea of an “Automated Appointment System” is purely from an idealistic point of view that there could be this solid pillar / structure where humans can solely rely on technology systems with little to no human intervention and that when one thinks of convenience, one can be assured that this convenience will not come at a cost of one’s productivity.
To me, “productivity” is a measure of how much work gets done over a certain period of time while “convenience” is a measure of how hassle-free a certain task is. I believe in today’s digitalized world, it has become more convenient than ever to do most things. In this context of appointment / booking systems, making a restaurant reservation no longer requires you to make a phone call and check on availabilities, you simply go on an “app” or “website”, and you see for yourself the dates which are open for you to book and select those dates which fit your schedule within a few clicks. At least a little bit more hassle-free if you ask me :) But actually how “productive” has this made us when we sometimes still have to wait longer than expected for our appointments / bookings and when food businesses lose money because of “no-shows” etc. ?
To the unknown future ahead, I am curious to see how this symbiotic relationship between humans and technology will evolve over time or will one reign supreme over the other…
