Rethinking the Line: Why Waitlists Aren’t Inevitable
By Molly Siegel, MPH
For decades, waitlists have been accepted as a fact of healthcare — the inevitable byproduct of limited capacity and high demand. Yet behind every list are real people whose needs don’t pause while they wait. For Professor Katherine Harding, that disconnect was impossible to ignore.
Dr. Harding, a professor of Allied Health and Implementation Science at La Trobe University and Eastern Health in Melbourne, Australia, has spent her career studying how health systems respond to bottlenecks. Experiencing waitlists firsthand as an occupational therapist, Harding’s work led to the development of STAT (Specific Timely Appointments for Triage) - a model that replaces backlogs with flow.
The insight behind STAT is disarmingly simple: don’t hide demand in a queue - meet it in real time. By aligning new-patient slots to actual referral patterns, services can stay in step with demand instead of perpetually trailing it. In multiple trials, the STAT approach has reduced wait times by more than a third - and, in some cases, eliminated them entirely.
What makes STAT transformative isn’t just its efficiency; it’s its equity. In traditional systems, those who can advocate for themselves often move up the line, while others remain unseen. STAT levels the playing field. Every patient gets a first appointment as soon as possible, and triage happens face-to-face - based on need, not noise.
For U.S. access leaders, STAT offers both inspiration and challenge. It’s a reminder that waitlists are not natural laws of healthcare - they’re design decisions. And design can change.
As Harding puts it, “When women arrive ready to deliver a baby, we don’t put them on a waiting list. We find a way to provide care.” The same ingenuity, she argues, can and should apply to every part of healthcare delivery.
The takeaway? The future of access isn’t about managing the backlog better - it’s about building systems where backlogs don’t have to exist.
Learn more about the STAT model here: https://www.thestatmodel.com/what-is-stat/.