Predicting no-shows for dental appointments

Patient no-shows is a significant problem in healthcare, reaching up to 80% of booked appointments and costing billions of dollars. Predicting no-shows for individual patients empowers clinics to implement better mitigation strategies. Patients’ no-show behavior varies across health clinics and the types of appointments, calling for fine-grained studies to uncover these variations in no-show patterns. This article focuses on dental appointments because they are notably longer than regular medical appointments due to the complexity of dental procedures. We leverage machine learning techniques to develop predictive models for dental no-shows, with the best model achieving an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.718 and an F1 score of 66.5%. Additionally, we propose and evaluate a novel method to represent no-show history as a binary sequence of events, enabling the predictive models to learn the associated future no-show behavior with these patterns. We discuss the utility of no-show predictions to improve the scheduling of dental appointments, such as reallocating appointments and reducing their duration.