Children’s counts on
Texting to make ER waiting less stressful for parents of sick kids.
Most patients in a hospital waiting room never know how long their wait will be, how many people are ahead of them or if hospital staff have forgotten about them.
The Montreal Children’s Hospital hopes a new text messaging service will answer those questions, and make waiting less stressful for parents of sick children.
Begun this month as a pilot project, the service is available to patients and their families once they have arrived at the emergency room and been evaluated by a triage nurse. A website tracks wait times, and allows parents to submit the hospital card numbers of their children and their phone numbers to receive updates by text message. Parents can also check wait times on the hospital’s website before deciding whether or not to register at the ER.
The service will then send SMS messages every five minutes to update patients on their wait. The text message will tell parents which category of patients their children fall under, and where they stand among patients in that category.
For those without smartphones, the emergency department provides two standup iPad kiosks that keep track of overall wait times.
“Wait times are out of our control,
“I think we all have to be thinking how to enhance the patient experience.” HARLEY EISMAN
but I think we all have to be thinking how to enhance the patient experience,” said Harley Eisman, medical director of the hospital’s pediatric emergency department. “This seems like an obvious choice.”
Eisman added the service could help the hospital save money by decreasing the number of patients in the waiting room, and could also avoid some cross-contamination because patients will no longer have to sit in a room filled with other sick people to wait for their treatment.
Eisman said he hopes it will also work to divert less serious cases away from the emergency room, because if parents know ahead of time they’ll have to wait for seven hours to see a doctor, they may be more inclined to leave and visit a walk-in clinic the following day.
“We were somewhat reticent to talk about wait times, with the thinking that someone would tell a patient to go home,” he said. “We’re not in the business of sending people away, but we think if we provide families with this information, they can make an enlightened decision.”
He added that with some enhancements, the program could let parents who are in for a long wait know which clinics outside the hospital could see their children sooner.
The program took about six months to put together, using information already available in the hospital’s patient management system.
While this is probably the first hospital in the province to have a system to notify patients through text messages, Eisman said there are already several hospitals in North America that provide similar services. However, implementing a pre-packaged system would have required the hospital to do a full replacement of its information management software, something that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. This new system was designed by in-house developers, often during their spare time, and can use the hospital’s existing infrastructure.
The biggest expense incurred by the implementation of the system is the time of the developers and the cost of two iPads, about $1,000. Hospital staff will be briefed on the system in the coming days, and there will be a publicity campaign to spread the word about the service.
Eisman said the project could easily be adapted to other departments and even other hospitals within the McGill University Health Centre.