Your call is important to us

Eric Giacomin and Jennipher Langille developed a program to manage calls to the Nova Scotia Breast Screening Program. (Danny Abriel Photo)

Even for a perfectly healthy woman, calling the Nova Scotia Breast Screening Program (NSBSP) to book a mammogram is never easy.

Beyond the bigger “what if” fear to overcome, there’s usually anxiety about the procedure itself, a process in which the breast is compressed between two plastic plates and x-rayed for both breast cancer and any other breast-related problems.

That’s why when a woman does phone the Nova Scotia Breast Screening Program to book an appointment, it’s critical her call is answered promptly.

“We have sites all around the province but use a central booking system. Incoming calls are queued in sequence, but it’s essential that we keep that queue to a minimum. Once someone has decided to call, we want them to be able to get through,” says Theresa Foley, program manager.

The number of participants in the breast screening program — and the call volume to the NSBSP — has increased significantly since December 2000, when the NSBSP began to book all mammography appointments in the central mammography booking database.

Knowing that a caller who has to wait “in queue” for a long time is likely to abandon the call, the NSBSP became an ideal site for two Industrial Engineering students at Dalhousie University to use industrial engineering forecasting methods and queuing theory to develop a tool to help the program manage their calling queue effectively.

Jennipher Langille, 24, and Eric Giacomin, 23, worked on the NSBSP project most of last year as their final project in earning their Bachelor of Engineering. Under the direction of project faculty advisor John Blake, they analyzed phone logs — collected by Bell Aliant Regional Communications and faxed to the program on a daily basis — looking for monthly seasonal factors and linear trends.

“This was a golden project in many respects,” says Dr. Blake. “There was a very real need on the part of the program, and they have this beautiful set of data. It’s rare that we get that.”

Using several mathematical modeling techniques, Ms. Langille and Mr. Giacomin worked out a forecast model to manage the queue and determine the number of phone representatives that would be needed to manage the volume of calls on any given day.

“The project had its tough points, but in the end we managed to figure out a solution,” says Mr. Giacomin, who is now working on his Master of Applied Science (MASc).

After extensive simulation and verification, the students delivered a final Microsoft Excel worksheet, combining the forecasting and queuing model, to the NSBSP and it’s working well, Ms. Foley says.

In July, the number of abandoned calls dropped from 8.8 per cent in 2008 to 6.5 per cent and she expects to see an even more dramatic difference in the coming months.

“October will be a key month to watch as it is breast cancer awareness month and typically our busiest time of year,” she says.

Ms. Langille and Mr. Giacomin’s project was one of six senior projects in the healthcare field last year. With NSBSP statistics showing that one out of eight women in Nova Scotia will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, knowing how their research project could result in earlier detection of breast cancer for some women gave it an added sense of significance, Ms. Langille says. “Eric and I wanted a healthcare project because you’re working on something that not only improves a system, it improves quality of life.”

The Nova Scotia Breast Screening Program is one of the leading breast screening programs in Canada. It was established in 1991 by the Nova Scotia Department of Health to increase the early detection rate of breast cancer.