Emergency Room Challenges: Options to Ease Overcrowding
Filed under: Emergency Services, Wait Times Health Services
A recent article by James Ellis and Aaron Razavi outlined seven methods to help alleviate overcrowding in emergency rooms. They include:
- Incorporate a nurse hotline for patients to call can help them decide whether their symptoms are severe enough for an emergency department visit.
- By publishing an online wait time, patients may better weigh if they need to act now or if their symptoms can wait. Implementing simple technological advancements can reduce patient stress and increase physician efficiency.
- Implementing a fast track system allows advanced care providers, such as registered nurses and physicians assistants, the ability to provide treatment to non-urgent cases while physicians see urgent cases.
- Patients not requiring urgent care may be treated in specialized observation units which may ease traffic flow and over boarding in the emergency department.
- Institute a hospital staff member to serve as a patient transfer liaison, in charge of overseeing the flow of emergency department patients to inpatient areas. This can significantly free up space and emergency department beds, while efficiently transferring patients to a more permanent stay.
- Create a separate sitting area or discharge room for patients waiting on medication, travel arrangements and other instruction. This can help in freeing hospital beds and preventing backups.
- Providing patients with a post discharge follow-up, including instructions and procedures to adhere by the days following their discharge, can reduce readmissions saving hospitals time and money. This is especially important with elderly populations who may need to be reminded of their detailed, at-home-care responsibilities.
Tackling each of these potential areas for improvement requires individual focus and resources. According to the 2010 Press Ganey ED Pulse Report, communicating wait times and delays is the most critical to improving patient satisfaction:
“As in prior years, it appears that patients are willing to wait for care as long as they are kept informed about the wait time. Patients who reported that they received “good” or “very good” information about delays reported nearly the same overall satisfaction whether they had spent over four hours or less than one hour in the ED.”
As consumers rely more on mobile channels for their information, implementing a universally accessible text channel such as the turnkey services offered by ER Texting, is a fast, easy and economical way to allow access to live emergency room wait times via a mobile device.
About ER Texting
ER Texting provides texting services to hospitals and urgent care facilities that want to post their emergency room wait time and allow consumers to access those times via text message. By virtue of its dedicated and highly recognizable SMS short code 4ER411, ER Texting offers a complete, secure, compliant and integrated texting and marketing platform. For more information on ER Texting and our capabilities, please visit www.ERtexting.com.
Baptist Health System, Birmingham Ala., Selects ERTexting for Communication of Emergency Room Wait Times
Filed under: Emergency Services, Other, Wait Times Health Services
New service allows patients to receive emergency room wait times mobile via any cell phone with text capability.
ER Texting is proud to announced that Baptist Health System, based in Birmingham, Ala., has selected the company as its provider for the SMS/text communication of Emergency Room (ER) wait times for Citizens, Princeton, Walker & Shelby Baptist Medical Centers.
Birmingham and North Central Alabama area residents can now access live wait times for all four hospital emergency rooms by simply texting their zip code to “4ER411” (437411). Wait times for all hospitals are delivered instantly. In addition to the ER wait times, BHS also provides information for its 40 Baptist Health Centers that accept walk-in patients, providing additional options for lower acuity patients.
With more than 5,000 text inquiries made in the initial launch month of November, the service has quickly established itself as a tool consumers can conveniently use from any cell phone to instantly retrieve live wait time emergency room information.
“The ability to provide valuable wait time information to our patients attracted us to this program,” said Ross Mitchell, Vice President of External and Governmental Affairs at Baptist Health System. “By deploying a zip code-based strategy, we’re able to provide relevant information since we’ve geographically associated zip codes to the nearest hospital emergency room, as well as to our Baptist Health Centers.”
Providing ER wait times improves patient satisfaction scores; delivers greater hospital transparency; provides for better load balancing and increased efficiency and ultimately increases ER visits. Today’s patients are demanding more and more healthcare related information. Posting ER wait times aligns with consumers’ expectations and is a determining factor when selecting a hospital for emergency care.
About ER Texting
ER Texting provides texting services to hospitals and urgent care facilities that want to post their emergency room wait time and allow consumers to access those times via text message. By virtue of its dedicated and highly recognizable SMS short code 4ER411, ER Texting offers a complete, secure and integrated texting and marketing platform. For more information on ER Texting and our capabilities, please visit www.ERtexting.com.
Why Publish Emergency Room wait times?
written by Jennifer Reynolds
Here are 4 facts on why hospitals are increasingly marketing their ER wait times via text and other advertising vehicles. If you have an ED to promote, the evidence is overwhelmingly positive.
Patient Satisfaction When patients know your emergency room wait time, their expectations are set and experience enhanced. Knowing what to expect translates into higher level of patient satisfaction.
Transparency Whether its quality scores, infection rates or provider comparisons consumers trust what they can see . Marketing your emergency room performance aligns with what consumers desire and are currently demanding.
Emergency Department Performance By being transparent, your ED team will be more motivated to drive performance, quality and patient satisfaction. Consumer awareness motivates ED team members to take deeper ownership of their services and instills a greater sense of pride. Published times can also support other benchmarks and metrics already in place.
Hospital Image Publishing emergency room wait times for consumers to instantly retrieve with a single text, reflects your being in touch with your communities. Reaching out to your markets and offering instantaneous information via a single text reinforces your position as a market leader. Your hospital will be seen as “informed and connected”.
There you have it. And we haven’t even covered the costs, which are minimal. You can usually promote your hospital’s live ER wait times for under the cost of that 1 newspaper ad that less and less people are reading every day. Catch the tech wave or get washed away. Some healthy advice!
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Hospitals Take ER Wait Times to Another Level
Filed under: Emergency Services, ER Facts, ER Reviews, Wait Times Health Services
ER Texting Phone Emergency
The U.S is the global texting leader with over 40 million subscribers. Its no surprise that more and more companies are using this method of communication to reach out to potential customers. One industry that has been hit with the texting frenzy is hospitals.
The idea of using your cell for an emergency is a concept that has been thought of before, just not in the ER room. ER Texting is a fairly new company that came up with the concept of texting wait times to those who are in need of emergency medial service. How it works is pretty simple: You text your zip code to 4ER411 and receive a text showing you ER wait times from local participating hospitals. Texting 4ER411 doesn’t cost you anything more than your regular texting fee, so it’s completely free to the users. Hospitals benefit from this by making it easier for patients to reach out to them and essentially help out those in need.
RSS Feed- Emergency Room Challenges: Options to Ease Overcrowding
- Baptist Health System, Birmingham Ala., Selects ERTexting for Communication of Emergency Room Wait Times
- Epic Snowstorm in Northeast Demonstrates Growing Role of Text Capability for Patients and Hospitals
- Press Ganey Associates Reports the Top 10 Metro Areas for Emergency Department Patient Satisfaction
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