Preventing Line Jumping

This enhancement ensures that patients arriving before their scheduled appointment time will not be assigned a room ahead of patients with earlier appointments. Early patients will only be assigned a room after the on-time patient's appointment deadline has passed, effectively preventing line jumping.

The “deadline” of the earlier patient is essentially a configurable deadline after which the earlier patient will be considered late for their appointment, as mention on our Late Patients page.   If this feature is enabled, as long as the earlier patient is not late, the subsequent patient will not be auto-roomed. The earliest the subsequent patient will be roomed is after the earlier patient’s deadline for checking in has passed.

For example, a clinician has patients scheduled for 10am, 10:15am and 10:30am. It’s now 10:16am, and the 10:15am patient has not arrived yet, but the 10:30am patient has. This configurable feature means CHIME will not room the 10:30am patient until the deadline for the 10:15am patient passes.  The deadline is configurable for each clinic (e.g. clinic may decide that 5 minutes after the appointment time is when is the patient considered late).