Our senior design project worked with Wellstar Health System to improve access to diagnostic mammography appointments across its outpatient health parks in Metro Atlanta. Wellstar completes over 30,000 mammography appointments each year across five health parks, but diagnostic mammography wait times were consistently above the 14 day third next available appointment target. This matters because diagnostic mammograms are follow-up exams after an abnormal screening or symptoms, so long waits can delay care, increase patient anxiety, and push patients to seek care outside of Wellstar.

To understand the problem, our team analyzed 30,792 historical appointments, conducted site visits, completed time studies, and built a discrete event simulation to test possible improvements before recommending them to the client. We found that the main issues were limited diagnostic capacity, workflow inefficiencies, and uneven demand across sites. Based on this, we developed recommendations for radiologist scheduling adjustments, a cross site float pool, standardized best practices, and a demand redistribution GUI. Together, these solutions help Wellstar move closer to the 14 day diagnostic access target while improving capacity, reducing delays, and using existing resources more effectively.