Does Your ER Deliver?

Nationwide, we're turning our hospitals, which were previously focused on providing high-quality medical care, into service-oriented hotels with the focus on "customer satisfaction", complete with valet parking, concierge service and lobbies that rival the Hyatt in aesthetics.

While this is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, the impact of the culture shift from seeing the people we treat as patients and turning them into customers is a difficult transition to make at best and dangerous at worst. When the focus shifts from treating the patient in the best manner possible to making sure the atrium is well-lit and there are no glitches in getting a "customer's" bags to a room, the cost of health care only goes up. Can quality still be emphasized simultaneously?

Now, that hotel-style trend is going to the emergency room.

ERs across the country are now offering various forms of financial remuneration for extended wait times. Tickets to sporting events, movie passes, meal vouchers, along with written apologies, are being offered to patients and their families who do not receive treatment in under thirty minutes.

In a country in which the average door-to-door time is 240 minutes, or 4 hours, receiving treatment in 30 minutes is really just a marketing ploy. Your ER physician can see you in 30 minutes, but that does not mean that your lab tests, X-rays or any other ancillary testing will be done any sooner than if you had waited in the lobby during that time.

Regardless of when the physician sees you and orders testing or therapies, there are still just as many people ahead of you in line as there was when you checked in, assuming the same triage level. Moreover, there will still be people coming in after you that will be treated ahead of you due to their acuity.

The final kicker, however, is the cost of the remuneration. Yes, those meal tickets or movie passes are included in the price of your admission to the E.R. And, with the rising number of ER visits per year, the opportunity to "earn" your movie passes is more and more likely.