Paula Dycaico, Director of Marketing at Quake Global
Few people are lucky enough to avoid a visit to a hospital Emergency Department in their lifetime, either as a patient or with a loved one needing urgent care. In a recent informal survey in the Quake Global office, we found that 89% of our employees had been to the emergency department and 64% of our employees had experienced a wait time of 4 hours or more. In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the average ED wait time was 30 minutes and the average time to treatment is 90 minutes.
Using the Medicare hospital compare website we found these statistics for our state:
The reasons for long waits in the ED are as complex as healthcare itself. People who come to the ED have a wide variety of conditions and complications that require careful management and thoughtful clinician triage. Seasonal illnesses like the flu can cause a large influx of people in waiting rooms. There can be geographic challenges as well. Hospital emergency departments in areas with dense populations can experience frequent overcrowding. According to AHRQ, nearly half of EDs report operating at or above capacity and 9 out of 10 hospitals report holding or “boarding” admitted patients in the ED while they await inpatient beds. Because of crowding, approximately 500,000 ambulances are diverted each year away from the closest hospital. ED crowding has been the subject of countless news articles, lawsuits, and research studies. 1
Patients who are otherwise healthy can get frustrated with long wait times and leave without treatment. This can create revenue leakage, but more importantly, premature departures without needed treatment can result in adverse events for patients, which can lead to legal complications for the hospital. In addition, patient satisfaction is impacted when patients wait beyond what they feel is an acceptable time frame. The latest data from HCAHPS surveys indicate that 12% of the 4,447 hospital participants received negative assessments from their patient respondents regarding time spend waiting for treatment.2 Because patient satisfaction is tied to reimbursement, these scores can impact revenue.
