It's a start

Congratulations to Sask Health on a big step in the right direction.


I mentioned in a previous post that I think pooled referrals should be facilitated not by "forcing" patients to see the first available specialist, but rather by providing them with accurate, up-to-date information about specialist wait times. Each person will then make their own informed decision. Sask Health has made a start toward achieving that. A website that lists specialist wait times has recently been released for public viewing. Now that we have transparency covered, we need to work on accuracy.

The website contains information on how long you could expect to wait for surgery with a given surgeon, had also how long he would wait for initial consultation with that surgeon. The surgery wait time information is updated monthly and is based on accurate information from health region databases. The consultation wait time information, only other hand, is self-reported by physicians. The biggest problem with this is that most physicians don't really know how long patients are waiting to see them. Also, physicians may be using different measures to estimate wait times.

For example, the "industry standard" for reporting patient wait times is the 3rd next available appointment (3rd NAA). This requires some basic understanding of Advanced Access principles and also takes some effort to calculate. There is no explicit incentive to make the effort to calculate 3rd NAA time.

Some electronic medical record programs have the ability to calculate 3rd NAA. However, when we tried it in our EMR, we got a result that was very different from our hand-calculated number. When we investigated that further we found that it was due to the way we book appointments in the electronic scheduler. Because our practice consists of scheduling office, cystoscopy, OR, lithotripsy and outpatient visits, the EMR software was finding openings in bookings other than just office appointments. It would have saved us a lot of time if we could just press a button and have a reliable 3rd NAA measurement but we are still unable to do that. Perhaps family physicians or specialists who only work in their office would have more luck. Unfortunately, virtually all surgeons will be working in more than one location.

Until all surgeons are involved with Advanced Access (someday soon!), the wait times listed on the website are unlikely to be reliable. Even so, that unreliability of the data is likely to be unintentional. There may be reasons why surgeons might"cook the data".

In our urology practice, we have the luxury of being the only group in Saskatoon. We are not competing for work. In fact, as I mentioned in my last post, there may even be a disincentive for us to improve our wait times because it will likely generate more and more consultations from outside of our traditional practice area. However, some specialty groups may be in direct competition with each other. In that case, they may gain a competitive advantage if they were to list consultation wait times as being shorter than reality.

Who will audit the wait times? How will they audit the wait times? If we agree that 3rd NAA should be the provincial standard, then an auditor would need to have access to each surgeon’s office scheduling records. They will likely need to do a manual calculation because EMR programs don't seem to be able to churn out accurate 3rd NAA figures (given complex schedules that are the norm in surgical practices). I suppose that the website managers could mandate that each surgeon's office must submit an accurate 3rd NAA figure on a monthly basis (and then do random audits to ensure compliance), but it would also be necessary to provide some financial reimbursement for surgeons to make that effort.

All of this presumes that the website actually has some value for patients and family physicians. The purpose of disseminating this information is to allow patients, along with their family physicians, to make better decisions as to which specialist they wish to be referred to. In order to be sure that this information is useful, and being used, the administrators would need to sit down with some focus groups to see what conclusions patients draw from this information, and how it influences their choice of specialist. Without knowing how consumers really use this information, and how they navigate the website, it's impossible to know whether it's of any value.

So, unless an investment is made in gathering accurate and timely wait time information, and also in determining how to make the website valuable for consumers, this is an exercise in public relations. Consumers need to know how the information is gathered (e.g. calculated 3rd NAA versus "best guess") and when it was last updated.


Let me revise my initial statement: Sask health has taken a baby step. But, it's still in the right direction!