Great expectations are placed on the appointments management in radiology. For example, the appointments management needs to support a plurality of appliances, needs to be clear and needs to permit changes.
The appointments management should provide for the allocated appointments to be visible so that a user can tell at a glance where there are still gaps which can be filled with new appointments.
The appointments management should also be able to support the allocation of appointments by taking into account the presence and absence of various doctors, other internal appointments, appliance preparation for specific examinations, the functions available on the appliance, etc.
The desire for optimum workload and an optimum order for the examinations in order to minimize appliance conversion times or avoid the cleaning time for contagious patients likewise determines the requirements that are placed on the appointments management.
Further requirements are the comprehensibility of changes in the appointments allocation, e.g. in the event of last-minute appointment cancellations or nonattendance by the patient, and a comparison of the scheduled sequence of appointments with the actual sequence of appointments on the appliance. This is used not only for the purposes of control by the radiology management, but rather is needed on the date of the appointment in order to incorporate emergencies into the sequence, and for information for patients (waiting time).
In a piece of appointments management software or a scheduling system, various tasks are performed by various people:                examination planning/workload planning—e.g. radiology management        general allocation of appointments—e.g. telephone service/allocation of appointments        control of workload—e.g. radiology management        information for patients/allocation of appointments for emergencies—e.g. reception        
In this case, the following problem needs to be solved: A limited space (for example a normal monitor) is intended to be able to be used to implement the tasks described above taking account of all the necessary supporting information.
In many places today, it is customary for appointments management to be in a paper appointment book into which the presence and absence of different doctors are entered. The scheduled and actual sequences of appointments can be compared only by way of a telephone query.