Doctors’ priority: Cutting wait times for patients
Sometimes a long line can come at a greater price than a temporarily empty stomach or losing out on Steelers season tickets.
Long wait times at emergency rooms are a national issue and afflict local hospitals as well.
“I think people are living longer, getting sicker, and we’re keeping folks with more complex problems alive longer,” said Thomas Campbell, Allegheny Health Network’s system chairman of emergency medicine. “And that’s keeping emergency departments busier for longer .”
The region’s medical community is well aware of the problem and is seeking solutions to shorten ER wait times.
“When it comes to patient access, the goal is to create as many levers and options for those patients [as possible], because it’s not a one size fits all,” said Kenyokee Crowell, AHN’s senior vice president of clinical access.
Ms. Crowell talked up AHN’s relatively new same-day appointment system, which guarantees anyone who calls before 11 a.m. Monday-Friday access to a primary care doctor that day.
Since the system began in January, AHN has booked 75,000 same-day appointments with primary care providers and specialists.
“We’re really excited to see where the program goes,” she said. “It’s a constant process to tweak the program. ... There’s seasonality in the business. We have to continually take a look and say, ‘Where can we do better?’”
UPMC has offered same-day appointments for some time, Joel Nelson, chief
clinical officer for UPMC’s health services division, said in an email.
“Reflecting the extraordinary demand by our patients for care by UPMC clinicians, as well as prompt appointment scheduling, we place high priority on fulfilling over 30,000 requests each month for either same-day appointments or appointments in the near future — most often in a day or two,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, same-day appointments cannot be used to gain quick access to emergency rooms. AHN has enacted other strategies to ease ER wait times.
“My message to folks is that if you need the emergency department, once you get here don’t think about the wait because we take care of the sickest people first,” Dr. Campbell said. “If you’re really sick, we’ll find some way, some place to take care of you.”
He said that AHN has gotten ER wait times — the time from coming in the door to being seen by a medical professional — down to 11-12 minutes, lower than the national average of approximately 30 minutes.
Two new initiatives have streamlined the door-to-doctor process, he said:
Rapid registration, which involves signing a person in with only their name, address and Social Security number and the new Provider in Triage (P.I.T.) system that allows hospitals to determine the sickest potential patients by pairing practitioners with a triage nurse.
“It sounds simple, but getting that process together has been a work in progress that I think is going extremely well,” Dr. Campbell said. “We’re getting our patients in really quickly and getting their tests started very quickly.”
The VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System also is working to get its patients care as quickly as possible.
“Our ultimate goal is to make sure the veteran gets the care when they need it,” said Jason Fay, the system’s group practices manager.
His main focus is the University Drive campus in Oakland, which Mr. Fay described as a “different animal than a primary care clinic” due to its complexity and high demand. As of April, it had the second-longest patient wait times in Pennsylvania.
To make it easier for veterans to schedule appointments at the University Drive facility, it has expanded its hours to Saturdays, strived to have more face-to-face interactions between patients and physicians and hired more hospital workers who, according to Mr. Fay, “have a better understanding of the veteran and what they’ve gone through.”