HCA Virginia yesterday launched a website that shows the wait time for its six Richmond-area hospitals. The times represent a four-hour rolling average that is updated every 30 minutes.
For example, at 5:40 p.m. yesterday, the average ER wait at Retreat Doctors' Hospital in the Fan District was five minutes, while at CJW Medical Center's two campuses, South Richmond's Chippenham had a wait of 12 minutes and Chesterfield County's Johnston-Willis had a wait of eight minutes.
"This is the speed with which we can get you to the person who can provide the medical assessment and treatment," said Karen Nelson, executive director for marketing at HCA Virginia.
Wait times are tracked using a statistical tracker system in the emergency rooms that transfers data to an RSS feed that automatically displays and updates the time online and on electronic billboards. HCA Virginia is the first to offer the technology in Richmond.
Cell-phone users can text "ER" to 23000 to receive a text back with average wait times.
Nelson said the initiative is to help patients with minor medical conditions determine the closest hospital with the shortest wait. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the average ER wait time is 55 minutes, up from 38 minutes 10 years ago. HCA Virginia's local hospitals had 212,306 ER visits in 2009.
"This is designed more for a patient that . . . needs emergency treatment but is not a critical emergency that needs to be seen by an ambulance," she said.
For non-urgent care, hospital officials want to have patients out of the emergency room within 90 minutes.
HCA Virginia has streamlined the process in emergency rooms so that patients can be seen more quickly. Sheldon Maguire, emergency-services administrator for HCA Virginia, said company hospitals have focused on two key concepts -- rapid triage and immediate bedding. Triage is the process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition.
So instead of having triage done in a specific place, which could delay the patient being seen by a provider, it now becomes a process.
"Yes, it is important to collect that information, and it is important to determine how sick the patient is, but we were asking all kinds of questions that really didn't pertain to how sick the patient was," Maguire said. "That information, we discovered, can be done be at bedside while their care was being done."
Maguire said doing so is not about cutting corners when it comes to patient care. A survey is conducted with each patient after discharge to gauge their level of satisfaction with the service. Among the questions is one asking whether the patient felt care was delivered too fast.
"That is something we look at with our team on a monthly basis," Maguire said.
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Copyright (c) 2010, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va.
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Hospitals Posting Average ER Waits OnlineOriginally from: http://www.nursinglink.monster.com/news/articles/12409-hospitals-posting-average-er-waits-online
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