How a 150-bed multispecialty hospital cut OPD wait times by 42% in a quarter

A 150-bed multispecialty hospital with a busy outpatient department was running into the same wall every morning. By 9am the waiting hall was full, the front desk was buried in phone calls, and patients with genuinely urgent needs were stuck behind routine follow-ups. Walkouts were rising, and so were complaints.

#The challenge

The hospital's appointment system treated every booking the same way. There was no way to triage urgency, no way to move a stable follow-up to a video consult, and no visibility into when the crush would hit. Staffing was set by habit, not by demand — which meant too few hands at the morning peak and too many in the afternoon lull.

#The approach

Garuda was rolled out in three steps over six weeks. First, Priority & Video Appointments replaced the flat booking flow: urgency-aware queues pushed acute cases forward, while stable follow-ups were offered a video slot that never needed a waiting-room seat. Next, Dashboards & Reports gave the OPD manager a live view of flow by department and hour. Finally, Garuda Intellect began forecasting footfall hour by hour, so the hospital could roster front-desk and lab staff against predicted demand rather than yesterday's guess.

"We stopped reacting to the queue and started staffing ahead of it. That one change rippled through everything." — OPD Manager

#The results

Within a single quarter, average OPD wait time fell 42%. Because video consults absorbed a meaningful share of routine follow-ups, clinicians saw 27% more consults per hour without working longer days. The front desk — freed from the constant ring of rebooking calls — handled 61% fewer phone calls, and patient-satisfaction scores climbed to 4.7 out of 5.

The hospital has since switched on pharmacy and wallet modules, extending the same single-record approach across the rest of its operations.