Make an appointment for the emergency room

The Tenet hospitals, seeking to make money through their potentially profitable ERs, are betting that patients will prefer to rest at home instead of waiting in their crowded lobbies, filled with sick people and emotional family members. Emergency room wait times have become a point of contention, or pride, with hospitals using their websites, text messages and billboards on Interstate 95 and others throughout the state to display, in real time, how many minutes patients must wait.
Susan Flanagan, of Boca Raton, recently made an emergency room reservation at West Boca Medical Center, a participating hospital, when she had severe abdominal pain.
"There is nothing worse than sitting and being miserable in an ER for hours," said Flanagan, 50, a production manager for a catalog company. "When I got there, they knew what was wrong with me and I was in a bed in five minutes."
Surveys have shown that the average wait time in an American emergency room is four hours. Some South Florida hospitals appear to get their patients in quicker. The wait time at Delray Medical Center last week was 16 minutes; at North Shore Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, it was nine minutes, according to the hospitals' websites.
The system has safeguards that officials say will ensure that a patient with a serious emergency, such as a heart attack, does not have to wait for an appointment. Patients enter their symptoms into the website, which forwards the information to nurses and paramedics at the emergency room front desks.
"We would call them on the phone and say, 'Tell me more about your pain,' " said Margaret Neddo, West Boca Medical Center's emergency room director. "If they have a history of aneurysms, we would say, 'Come in now.'"
Still, some doctors say the system could make some patients who want a reservation delay treatment when there's a true emergency.
Dr. Ryan Stanton, spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, said he has seen many patients try to "sleep off" a stroke or a heart attack, and says they may do the same if they go online and see they can't make a reservation for a few hours.
"It needs to come with a lot of teaching about what an emergency is," said Stanton, an emergency room physician in Lexington, Ky. "With a heart attack, every minute you delay at home is another minute you lose heart muscle and can have permanent damage."
A 2009 General Accounting Office study found it was taking 37 minutes to see emergency room patients who had conditions that required care within 14 minutes. The reasons are complex, said Dr. Andrew Bern, attending emergency physician at Delray Medical Center, and include a shortage of beds for psychiatric patients; the closing of nearby hospitals in recent years, which has increased visits to remaining emergency rooms; and an insufficient number of beds for ER patients who need to be admitted to the hospital.
Only about 8 percent of emergency room visits are non-urgent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The primary reasons for going to the ER: chest pain and abdominal pain. Emergency rooms are most crowded on weekends and at night, when doctors' offices are closed, according to ACEP.

Chris Song, marketing director for InQuickER, based in Nashville, said company founders noticed overcrowded emergency rooms were inefficient, with personnel communicating poorly and having trouble managing patient surges. The company started in 2006 and now has 37 participating hospitals, with 95 percent of registrants seen within 15 minutes, he said.
Flanagan said she sent her information to West Boca at 9 a.m. and got a 9:30 a.m. appointment, which the hospital changed to 11 a.m. Her diagnosis: a gall bladder stone and other complications, which landed her in the hospital for a week.
"When I got there, they knew my name, they had my paperwork and they were ready for me," Flanagan said. "The only downside is you have to pay 10 bucks."
Source http://www.sun-sentinel.com/