By Luis Fabregas
The Pittsburgh Tribune Review
PITTSBURGH — Excela Health System is posting its emergency department wait times online, putting the spotlight on how other providers deal with the lengthy and often annoying delays that come with a trip to the hospital.
Excela leaders said the wait times, updated on its Web site hourly, should help patients decide at which of its four Westmoreland County hospitals they will wait the least for treatment of minor emergencies.
“This is not meant to circumvent calling an ambulance, and it’s not meant for people who have a major emergency who should still call 911,” said Lonna Paterline, vice president of clinical services at Frick Hospital in Mt. Pleasant, where the program got started earlier this month. “We just felt this gives patients and their families an option.”
The advertising of ER wait times is gaining popularity across the country, with some hospitals in Texas sending text messages or using the social networking service Twitter to promote their wait times. This coincides with longer wait times nationwide.
A study published last month in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine showed 1 in 4 patients wait longer than recommended to be evaluated in an emergency department.
Hospitals in the region have addressed the problem in different ways, with Allegheny General Hospital’s Suburban campus in Bellevue having gone as far as promising movie passes to those who wait longer than 30 minutes.
Its parent, the West Penn Allegheny Health System, does not post wait times, but it has reduced wait times at its community hospitals to less than 30 minutes, said spokesman Dan Laurent. That’s, in part, because the hospital system added space at some facilities and implemented fast-track patient registration and triage systems, Laurent said.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the region’s largest network with 20 hospitals, said it considered posting wait times online, but officials said they chose to focus on the quality of care rather than on what they felt was an advertising gimmick.
“It’s more of a marketing tool rather than a tool to help patients get their care,” said Dr. Donald Yealy, UPMC’s chair of emergency medicine. “It’s not entirely clear that’s helpful to the average person.”
Yealy said the hourly updates can get stale quickly and may change abruptly if seriously ill patients arrive without warning.
During the past five years, UPMC implemented a system that allows doctors to monitor in real time key elements of its emergency department visits, including how many patients are waiting at any given time and how long they’ve been waiting. Yealy gets a daily report that shows the average wait time at UPMC’s three core facilities -- Presbyterian, Shadyside and Mercy. On Monday, the average wait time -- from when the patient arrived to how long it took to start treatment -- was six minutes, he said.
The entire visit lasts an average of two hours, he said.
Robin Jennings, Excela’s director of communications, said posting wait times is not meant as a marketing strategy or to gain a competitive edge.
“It’s providing a customer service,” she said. “I can’t tell everyone in my service area at any given time what the waiting time is other than electronically. Posting the wait time allows me to communicate more broadly with the people we serve.”
Paterline said online wait times benefit those with noncritical medical issues such as a sore throat or a swollen ankle. More people are using the emergency department as a source of primary care rather than going to a doctor’s office, she said, so it makes sense to help patients during off-times such as weekends, when they can control how quickly they will be seen and treated.
The new practice will not change the way patients are treated and triaged, Paterline said. They will continue to be prioritized based on the severity of their condition, and the most ill will be seen and treated first.
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