NOTE: the following is NOT an April Fool's Day joke.
I'd like to thank the Science Marches On Department for sending me a truly remarkable piece of research.
Scheduling in a medical clinic requires talent, skill, and magic. There's only so much time in a day, and a lot of patients who need to be seen. People often portray the front-desk wizards as brainless, but they're far from it. Mary, after 14 years, knows me and my patients. From a few seconds on the phone she can get a good idea of how much time any particular patient will need, how that meshes in with the rest of my schedule, and (based on history) how long I am with any given return.
She also has to figure in how long it take takes me to grab a Diet Coke and drain a previous one between visits.
Any practice faces this issue, so obviously some research goes into improving work flow.
A study out of Miami, Florida recently looked into this important subject to calculate times needed for appointments at a fertility clinic.
Specifically, how long it took for a guy to, uh, shake hands with the milkman.
Yes, they wanted to know. That.
In the study guys were given a donation cup and unnamed porn mag. A stopwatch was started at the time they entered the room. They then took matters into their own hands, and texted "done" to the stopwatch person after the research project had climaxed.
For privacy, the exam room had a curtain. Boy, that's a relief.
Admittedly, it sure beats the idea of having a burly orderly with a timer in there, watching you box the one-eyed champ, but still.
The study makes no mention if the guys were allowed to wash their hands before picking up their phones to text the desk afterwards.
This graph is, by far, the best part of the article. It shows how long a guy takes to let it fly while pumping gas vs. the number of patients seen that day.
Note the blue bars: some guys actually had their ladies in the room during the process, although, under the fertility protocols, they weren't allowed to have physical contact. So the bottom line is that, if someone is watching you polish the banister, it will take longer to finish the job. In fact, the ONLY guy in the study who was unable to successfully finish marching the penguin was one who had his girlfriend in there.
Who could have seen that coming?
You can read the study itself here. It has pictures of the exam room, and a porn mag with a brown paper cover on it.
Thank you SMOD!
