Sunday, July 31, 2011

I ♥ Calgary's online ER wait times project

I have a huge (data-) crush on Calgary's Health Region!

They have captured and posted online the ER wait times at the city's healthcare facilities.

The website shows estimated wait times for 4 hospitals and 2 health centres.  The information is automatically updated every 2 minutes.  There's a comprehensive disclaimer that reminds people that ERs are unpredictable places, that wait times may change significantly within a short period, and that patients will be see according to the severity of their condition.

Health region representatives said they hope that making this information easily available will help patients to decide whether to go to the closest ER, or the one with the shortest wait time, and thus distribute the workload more evenly.

There's an interesting "behind the scenes" page linked to the main page.  It explains more about the online system and how the wait times are calculated.  The wait times displayed online are calculated based on the number of patients waiting to be seen, their disease acuity, and the number of medical staff available to see patients.

The times are automatically calculated by Calgary Health's IT system, so there's no additional clerical work needed.  Nice!

A few thoughts on this national first:

I'd be interested to see how the calculated wait time correlates with the actual patient experience.  This will likely be studied and posted as part of the evaluation phase of this project.

Might patients be discouraged from seeking urgent medical care if they see how long the wait will be?  People already realize they will have to wait for ER attention, but if they have already invested the time and effort to get to the ER, I suspect they are more likely to stick around until they are seen.  Will advance knowledge of ER wait times change patient's behaviour?  If so, is this necessarily a bad thing? That is, might some people be more likely to seek care for less urgent problems from their family physician if the ER is "less convenient"?  This would be a tough one to measure because the patient's experience won't be captured at an ER visit.  Maybe family medicine clinics will anecdotally report that patients are deciding not to go to the ER.

Power to the people!  Now that this information is available publicly and in real-time, I'm keen to see who will be the first to use it for other than its stated purpose.  I don't mean using the information for a nefarious reason (although there may be some way to do that...), I mean a mashup, combining online data sets to produce new functionality beyond the original intent.  For example, someone could combine Calgary traffic and transit system data with the ER wait time to show the patient's real wait time experience.  (Similar to how we now consider patient's entire wait for surgery to be "Wait 1" - wait for consultation with surgeon - plus "Wait 2" - the time from the OR booking being submitted to the actual date of surgery.)  
Depending on where someone lives and the transportation available to them, it might make more sense to visit the ER that nominally has a longer wait time, because the total patient wait (combined transit + ER wait) is actually shorter.  If that were the case, and it resulted in more congestion in an already busy ER, perhaps Calgary Health IT would communicate with Calgary Transit and more buses could be put on the routes that lead to the less congested ER.   (Mmm, mmm, mmm! System integration!)
Some enterprising computer science student will create an app that pulls the data to smart phones, so a single click will let people know which ER they should head for.  As long as that app is in the works, why not link it to a health advice FAQ site (official Alberta Health, of course) that gives suggestions for self-management of common conditions that often lead to low-acuity ER visits.  
Similarly enterprising engineering or business students will track the publicly posted data and identify trends of ER congestion.  Queue theory experts insist that, even in the unpredictable world of the ER, there is enough predictability to guide staffing plans.  Analyzing the trends in Calgary's ERs would be a great student project.

The greatest thing about this project is just that they did it.  Plain and simple, they did it!  Alberta has shown that meaningful, real-time health system data can be collected and displayed in a way that helps the public make better decisions about their health care.  Once the bugs are worked out, this can be spread across Alberta.  Soon, people in other provinces will come to expect this service.

We can use the Alberta's ER model to help manage other health care congestion, for example, hospital beds.  Hospital ward managers tell me they spend a big part of their day figuring out which patients are ready for discharge and then facilitating discharge or transfer.  Sometimes, a message will be posted in the OR: "Please arrange patient discharge as soon as possible today.  Wards are full and surgery may be cancelled."  By the time word gets around, it's at least 10 am, and the prime opportunities for deciding about discharge have passed.

How about pushing real-time data to each hospital physician?  Include the number of patients he/she has in hospital, the "national expected length of stay" for each patient's condition, the current length of stay, hospital occupancy and an indicator as to whether the physician has indicated a planned date of discharge.  This information could be sent to the physician's phone every evening so discharge planning can be done that night, or early in the morning.  The information is already available; it just needs to be aggregated.

Show us the way, Alberta!

5 comments:

  1. Great stuff. I have linked referred to you in this blog post: http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/2011/08/action-in-saskatoon.html

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  2. Thanks, Paul. As I'm a long-time fan of your example of frankness and transparency in healthcare blogging, I appreciate your encouragement.

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  3. MEDwaitTime is a similar application.What I don't get is how they measure the time each patient waits. I mean that it is simple to understand that waiting starts at the triage nurse. But when the patient is finally seen by a doctor what happens? Where is the "stop button". I am trying to figure out low cost ways to collect and publish such data in the hospital i used to work at, but nothing yet. Any ideas?

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  4. Thanks for writing. I'm not familiar with MEDwaitTime, but what I see on their website looks interesting in that their software lets patients know in real-time what the wait time is at a clinic or ER. I particularly like the fact that they recognize that "An informed patient is a happy patient"!

    Thanks for the information!

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