Why Publish Emergency Room wait times?

April 13, 2010 by ABA · Leave a Comment
Filed under: ER Facts 

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

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.

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