It feels important to point out that by now the technology to do something like this, to give patients-in-waiting a countdown queue telling them how close they are to being their turn is now trivial.
It would never be accurate to the minute but this kind of logistics has been nailed down to a science for many years. Basically all package transport uses those now, you get emails or SMS telling you how close delivery is. This is not hard at all. It was hard, but when you work at something it gets better and we have the benefit of billions invested on doing these things.
But from what I can see, all healthcare is hyper-local and there is basically no coordination at higher levels, in some cases it's down to individual clinics. In the Canadian system, for example, most physicians are basically self-employed and bill the government. They manage their own thing, even though they aren't trained to do this, there is essentially almost no economies of scale or logistical support at a higher level.
It would make no sense to build such a system in a everyone-for-themselves model, it would be a mess of incompatible technologies. This is the kind of thing that works when made into a standard. Given that all the key technologies are in place, it's just a matter of deciding which ones to use and implement at scale.
So it's technologically easy to do this, but impossible because the problem is humans not working together. And because the main benefit would be seen as the patient's time, even though it would improve the flow of things for physicians as well, and that's never a priority because there is simply no incentive to do this. No incentive to improve things. No wonder so little progress occurs.
