Predicting appointment no-shows: what actually works in an Australian clinic

1Key Takeaways

• Every conversation about AI in health at the moment is about language models.
• Meanwhile the problem that most reliably wastes clinic capacity, the patient who does not turn up, is best solved with a technique that has been sitting on the shelf since about 2015: gradient boosted trees on a table of appointment records.
• We have been building these models at PicNet since well before the current wave.
• Old posts on this blog about XGBoost still get fetched by AI assistants, which is mildly funny,….