Ever find a dollar bill in your pocket?  Bonus!  Today's episode is just like that...I was searching through my pile of data files looking for something when I stumbled upon an analysis I put together last year but forgot to share: does appointment depth affect well visit coverage?

What is appointment depth?  It's my term for how far out a practice schedules appointments.  I have posited, unscientifically, that practices who open their appointment books out farther (a year is the target) do a better job keeping kids current with their well visits.  It's common sense, really - if you depend on your patients to remember to make their appointments, your demand is going to go down.

With Igor's help, we decided to take a look.  Below, we have a scatter plot showing each practice's well visit coverage (3 colors, 3 age groups) on the Y axis and the "depth" of the appointments - measured here as the average length of time between the appointment and when it was scheduled.  The higher up the dot is placed, the better the practice's well visit coverage is.  The further to the right the dot is placed, the further out the practice tends to schedule appointments.

Now, see those lines?  That's the linear regression showing the relationship of the distribution.  Summary?  The further out pediatric practices schedule, the better their well visit coverage is.  Data!  I can finally stop dancing around this assumption.

Someone ask me about the other scheduling data I have...