You've probably heard stories about long wait times in emergency rooms, especially if the reason you're there isn't life-threatening. But they may soon be a thing of the past.
This isn't a sight you see in too many emergency rooms - no one's waiting. "This is my second time here and both times in the ER, I've passed through very rapidly, there was very little waiting at all," says patient Jerome Hanrahan.
That's something he can appreciate, after tearing his achilles tendon, "We've gone to ERs and spent a lot of time we may have well of brought a camp stove and sleeping bags."
But at one Arizona group of hospitals, they don't want their patients to wait. "You want your loved one taken where you're going to be seen the fastest," says Nancy Hicks-Arsenault.
She and her staff came up with the idea of posting wait times on the internet, so their patients could have a choice. "The public really needs to know what the real time is to wait, not an average time, not a guarantee. They need to know what's really happening in your ed every minute. And that's what we've tried to supply is the transparency," says Hicks-Arsenault.
The times are also posted in the waiting room. Or Nancy says, you can check them on your mobile device, "Every three minutes it updates, because we know in three minutes, things change. People wait longer, or they get back to be seen by a physician."
This information highway idea is catching on at hospitals around the country. It's something patients can quickly learn to love. "I think being able to know that you have the availability of predicting how much wait time you're going to get before you ever get to the hospital, that's a good feature," says Hanrahan.
The American College of Emergency Room Physicians finds ER's are not keeping up with patient capacity. Over the past decade, emergency departments have shrunk by 7% as the number of patients admitting to emergency rooms has increased by 32%. So all efforts to reduce wait times are a step in the right direction.
