The wave-off mechanism illustrates a trade-off between immediate workload relief and long-term operational performance. While it helps physicians address short-term capacity constraints, it may undermine optimal long-term patient care and system efficiency. This study highlights the operational and behavioral implications of physician-driven demand modulation, including the subtle yet consequential phenomenon of physician-reduced demand, in which patients are implicitly discouraged from revisiting due to workload-driven adjustments in care delivery.
Dai et al. (2026) studied this question.