In a modern emergency department, a 30-minute door-to-doc average is a remarkable accomplishment. Across the United States, many patients wait a matter of hours. In contrast, at our partner hospitals, InQuickER patients are seen by a doctor within 15 minutes or less, guaranteed, or the entire ED visit (including ED physician fee and any diagnostic services) is free.
This is a jaw-dropping, eyebrow-raising guarantee; with traditional ED patient flow, it simply wouldn’t be possible, but by allowing patients to register online and wait at home, we’ve been able to reduce time spent in the waiting room by an order of magnitude.
It's not the wait, it's the waiting room!
Emergency departments are legendary for their long waits, and incoming patients often expect to sit for hours before being seen. More importantly, though, a typical ED wait has two frustrating and stressful characteristics: first, the patient has no idea how long the wait will be, and second, the patient is forced to wait in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar waiting room. We are finding that patients are often satisfied to wait, if they can wait at home and they know when they can expect to see the doctor.
Patients and ED staff benefit
InQuickER gives patients more control of their healthcare; we give them time and comfort, by allowing them to wait at home, and certainty, by telling them when to expect to see the doctor. We give the emergency department staff more control over the flow of incoming patients, as well; as the ED becomes more busy, the InQuickER registration system offers progressively later treatment times to online patients, which helps to keep low-acuity patients out of the waiting room during times when they would normally wait for hours.
How many visits are written off because of the guarantee?
The (quite literally) million-dollar question, then, is this: What is the cost of committing to this level of patient service? How many visits do our partner hospitals have to write off as a consequence of this 15-minute guarantee?
The answer: Since our launch in 2006, less than 1 visit per 1,000 has been written off.
What if the hospital misses the 15-minute window?
Sometimes, InQuickER patients aren’t seen within 15 minutes. An emergency department is an unpredictable place, and an unexpected influx of high-acuity patients can lengthen the wait time considerably, preventing the ED staff from meeting the 15-minute guarantee. As you might guess, this happens more frequently than once per every 1,000 patients, but we’ve found that InQuickER patients are quite willing to wait in these situations, if they are treated with respect and the situation is explained to them; in most cases, they choose to pay the bill in spite of the delay in treatment.
We can’t remove all uncertainty, discomfort, and inefficiency from a patient’s experience, but we make it as predictable, comfortable, and efficient as possible, and patients place a high value on this service.
