The situation

A day with three investigations is a scheduling problem that the patient has to solve alone. The blood draw needs fasting. The CT needs 30 minutes after the contrast injection. The X-ray needs no appointment, so it fits anywhere, except that the department closes between 1 and 2. The consult is worth nothing until the reports come back. And the pharmacy counter closes at 5.

Each department knows its own constraints. Nobody holds all of them at once, so the patient holds them, standing in a corridor with a folder.

What the guidance does

The day becomes a plan with dependencies rather than a list of appointments. The order is chosen to satisfy the constraints: fasting first, contrast waits respected, departments visited inside their hours, and the consult placed after the reports it depends on. Walk times between stops are already in the map.

Then the plan moves. A queue runs long, a report is late, a doctor gets called away. When one stop slips, the rest are re-ordered around it, and the person is told what changed instead of working it out at a counter.

What changes

Nobody spends the day negotiating with three departments. Waiting time between steps gets used, the consult happens on the same day rather than being rescheduled, and fewer appointments are missed because two stops collided.

Where this stands

In design. The map and its walk times are live, and the queue estimate is the piece being built for the waiting phase. What this page describes is the layer above both: a sequence with dependencies and a re-plan when something slips.

The first version runs as a day plan published by the department, with progress and re-planning on the patient side. Two-way scheduling with appointment systems comes later and is the reason this is not yet in a pilot.