If you have ever played GE’s patient shuffle game, you have some idea of the enormous challenges hospitals face managing the flow of patients between triaging them, assessing their needs, treating them and moving on to the next ones. One emerging trend is hospitals taking online appointments for ER visits.
Hospitals, particularly those run by Dallas, Texas-based Tenet Healthcare, are offering reservations and concierge services like mobile apps that provide wait times to improve the patient experience at hospitals, according to an article by Bloomberg. Health IT companies are providing the service as well. In Quicker works with 140 hospital emergency rooms to provide a concierge service. One benefit of these concierge services is that they ask patients questions that help hospitals with triage.
Some health IT companies have been offering appointment booking to physician practices. And some hospitals have been presenting this option for doctor appointments. Earlier this year, Penn Medicine associate chief information officer Brian Wells told MedCity News it was updating its patient portal, MyPennMedicine, to permit its 70,000 registered users to make and cancel appointments and track allergies and immunizations, among other things. RegisterPatient offers a platform for physician practices to have patients fill out registration documents before they go in for their appointments.
The ER wait at hospitals has grown in the six years to 2009 from 47 minutes to 58 minutes, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics cited by the article. Taking a page from the travel and hospitality industries to improve the patient experience seems like a step in the right direction. It will go some way to reducing the stark contrast, generally speaking, between healthcare systems operations technology and the cutting-edge technology being developed by medical device, drug development, biotechnology and health IT.
