Hospital slashes waits with bedside registration
30 minutes or less’ . . . or free tickets
Oakwood Hospital and Medical Center in Dearborn, MI, is using the slogan "we’re an emergency room, not a waiting room" and backing up its claim with an offer of free theater tickets to patients who wait more than 30 minutes.
The hospital is part of a trend toward moving the emergency department (ED) registration process to the bedside or the back end of the patient visit, which is helping providers cut wait times while still adhering to Emergency Medical Treatment Labor Act (EMTALA) regulations, says Stephen Frew, JD, a longtime specialist in EMTALA compliance.
Over the course of 84,000 visits, the hospital gave out only 500 sets of tickets to a local theater production, says Frew, a web site publisher (www.medlaw.com) and risk management consultant for Physicians Insurance Co. of Wisconsin in Madison. The practice has expanded to all seven hospitals in the group with which Oakwood is affiliated, and the hospital is considering cutting the guarantee to 15 minutes, he adds.
Moving the registration process into the treatment area typically requires "a major change in attitude among physicians," Frew notes. "[Physicians] either don’t want to pitch in and be part of being more aggressive in expediting their work, or they have the idea that they would be seeing more people, which would bring in more nonpaying patients."
That outcome would differ from location to location, he says, but in the case of Oakwood, the new process actually brought in more paying patients. "The results were that people were coming from the suburbs, bypassing other hospitals to get cared for there."
Oakwood Hospital and Medical Center in Dearborn, MI, is using the slogan were an emergency room, not a waiting room and backing up its claim with an offer of free theater tickets to patients who wait more than 30 minutes.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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