Health care facility sends text updates on ER waiting times

For people whose decision whether to visit a health care center hinges on how long they have to wait to be seen, a Chicago-area hospital has the answer: it will text you approximate wait times for its emergency room. Edward Hospital in Naperville, Ill. is among the first to try this. According to the Chicago Tribune, the health care facility has worked to decrease "door to doctor" wait times and is now making it as easy as possible for patients to know just what those wait times are. Folks can get up-to-date wait times online, over the phone and now by text message.

Posting wait times on health care facility websites has been around for a while. Patients have been able to click on a health care facility website and view waiting times, available procedures and any other number of services. But the Chicago health care facility takes it a step further. Simply by texting the hospital you'll receive an approximate wait time until you can been seen by a health care provider. This is interesting on a number of levels, both in terms of the "consumer" like expectations of health care facilities it can foster to the increasing use of technology to communicate and archive information in the health care industry.

It's hard to argue that health care is not a business when, in fact, it is a business. Many health care companies are publicly owned. Many earn a profit and pay dividends to shareholders. At the same time, health care is not a business. People who are sick are patients, not customers. Basic health care should be a right, not a commodity to be sold to those who can afford it. If the motive for hospitals to post and text wait times is to discourage people who don't have a true emergency from coming to the emergency room, then hooray. But if the motive is to appear more consumer friendly, and in doing so encourage people to demand that "the customer is always right," then it becomes too easy to forget that we are actually dealing with a finite resource.

People forget that when it comes to emergency rooms especially. They show up because they have no health insurance and can't afford a regular doctor, urgent care center or other health care facility. And sometimes they show up because other doctors send them there. When they are not seen within what they consider to be a reasonable time, they get upset. Sometime they get violent. A recent study noted how violence is surging at health care facilities across the country: The suspected cause: dwindling mental health resources have led patients with severe mental illness to rely on hospitals and emergency rooms for services. There, they often wait hours before being treated, all the while growing more agitated until they reach their trigger point and commit violence, according authors of the report. A secondary cause of the increase in violence, according to those experts, are people who feel entitled to fast-food style service, even in a health care setting, and don't want to wait for treatment. They, too, reach a breaking point and turn to assault or other violent acts.

So let's hope that these text messages help encourage the rational use of emergency rooms and other health care facilities.

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