Why room-hour charts beat “percent full”
Slot-fill percentages hide empty chairs. Room-hour views show when consulting space actually sat unused during clinic capacity analysis.
A specialty block booked at 92% can still waste a room. If every appointment is fifteen minutes but half the patients need twenty-five, the last two hours of the afternoon look “full” on the booking screen while a second chair sits dark.
Room-hour charts ask a different question: for each consulting space, how many hours was someone actually in the room, versus how many hours the template claimed? During observation days we mark idle chairs even when the schedule looks dense.
Clinics in our Vietnam engagements often discover that “full Saturdays” include long silent stretches after 15:00. Shortening the template feels counterintuitive until the room-hour view makes the emptiness obvious.