Free tool
What are your lapsed screening patients worth?
Put your own numbers in and see the revenue sitting in the women who did not come back for their annual mammogram.
Free tool, no sign up
How many screening slots does your unit really hold?
Build the template from the machine and the technologist rather than from hope, and see what no shows quietly take back.
Screening templates in independent centers are often inherited. Somebody set fifteen minute slots years ago, the unit was replaced, positioning and image checks changed, and the template stayed. Then the day runs late every afternoon and everyone blames the schedule. This calculator rebuilds the number from the parts you can measure: how long the exam actually takes, how long the room takes to turn over, and how many staffed hours the unit really gets.
It also prices the no show rate in hours, which is the version that changes behavior. A percentage on a report is easy to shrug at. Four hours of a paid technologist and an idle unit every week is a different conversation, and it is usually the one that gets recall work funded.
Your result
Bookable slots per day
22
What the unit holds when every slot is filled and everyone arrives.
Exams actually kept per day
19.4
The same template after your no show rate takes its share.
Screening exams per year
4,646
Annual kept volume for this one unit at this template.
Idle unit hours per week
4.4
Paid technologist time on an empty unit because patients did not arrive.
Capacity for a single mammography unit at the template you described, before double booking or overbooking policy.
Measure the exam, do not remember it
Ask a technologist to time ten routine screening studies from the moment the patient enters the room to the moment images are accepted. Do it on an ordinary week, not a quiet one. Most centers find the real figure sits a few minutes above the template, which explains the afternoon drift better than any staffing theory does.
Turnover is the number people forget entirely. Gowning, wiping down, walking back to the waiting room and finding the next patient is rarely under three minutes and often more when the changing area is shared. Put it in the model as its own field so nobody is tempted to bury it inside exam time and then wonder where the day went.
What the idle hours figure is for
Idle unit hours per week is the cost of your no show rate expressed as something a manager can act on. It is technologist wages against an empty room, and it is why a recovery queue that rebooks a missed screening within the same week pays for itself quickly. Cutting the rate by a few points usually returns more capacity than any change to the template.
Before you overbook to cover it, check who is not arriving. If the no shows cluster among first time screening patients or among women booked more than six weeks out, the fix is a reminder ladder and shorter lead times, not a double booked slot that punishes the patients who do turn up on time.
Questions about this calculator
Should I model screening and diagnostic on the same unit?
Run screening here and keep diagnostic separate. Diagnostic visits are longer, less predictable and often need a radiologist available, so folding them into a screening template hides the very variability you are trying to plan around.
Our unit runs tomosynthesis. Does that change the numbers?
It mostly changes exam time, so measure your own room time and enter that. The structure of the calculation is unchanged, and turnover, staffed hours and no show rate still drive most of the result.
Why subtract operating weeks instead of using fifty two?
Because service visits, holidays and technologist leave are real and predictable. Using fifty two weeks produces an annual capacity your center has never once achieved, which makes the whole plan easy to dismiss.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The annual recall cycle checklist for screening centers
Everything a scheduler has to do to turn a twelve month due list into kept screening appointments, in the order it actually happens.
That figure is the size of your recall list
Whatever number just appeared came out of women who were screened once, then passed their due month while nobody had the hours to work the list. A demo shows the same cohort as a working queue: staged texts and letters, replies waiting on a slot, and yesterday's missed screenings already lined up for a second attempt inside the week. Bring your own inputs and we will run them against a live board.