SOUTHINGTON, CT – The hours-long wait in the emergency department is the standard of almost any hospital horror story – for the hospital as well as the patient. It’s frustrating for the patient who wants to be treated, and for the hospital administrator who wants to provide quality care and ensure a good rapport with the community.

 

To help eliminate those long waits, the Hospital of Central Connecticut recently launched a service that allows potential patients to check ER wait times at the hospital’s New Britain General and Bradley Memorial campuses on their cell phones. All they have to do is text their zip code to 4ER411.

 

“I have yet to see a person who doesn’t have a cell phone,” said Jeff Finkelstein, the hospital’s chief of emergency medicine, in a story in the Record-Journal.

 

The service is provided by Miami-based ERtexting, a two-year-old company that is working with hospitals in Florida, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey and New England.

 

Company spokesman Tony Baradet says the service isn’t designed for life-and-death situations, but for people with “minor emergencies … who don’t want to wait six or seven hours to see someone.”

“We’re basically a delivery system of a message,” he said.

 

Baradet said ERTexting probably won’t be used as a comparison tool because not all hospitals or urgent care centers in a given market will subscribe. Instead, he said, hospital administrators see the service as a marketing tool, one that increases patient satisfaction. In turn, hospitals will work to make their EDs more efficient to keep their wait times down.

 

“Hospitals are seeing consumerism not as a trend or a fad, but as a necessary vehicle for communication,” he said.

 

“We know that information in the hands of patients helps drive satisfaction,” added Finkelstein, whose two EDs – a 46-room unit at the New Britain campus and a 13-room unit at Southington-based Bradley – log more than 100,000 visits a year. “This service helps us to be transparent to our patients, even before they arrive at one of our campuses.”

 

ERtexting isn’t the only vendor – or provider – to tap into the texting market.

 

In South Carolina, the Trident Health System is making wait times at its three emergency departments available to anyone who texts “ER” to 23000, then entering a zip code. Average wait times have been posted on the health system’s website for several months. The system, composed of Trident Medical Center, Summerville Medical Center and Moncks Corner Medical Center, saw 100,000 ER patients last year.

 

“Patients who have serious medical emergencies such as stroke, cardiac arrest and trauma are always seen immediately; however, we are now able to provide non-emergent patients the opportunity to see our average wait times before they arrive at one of our facilities,” said Cheryl Goforth, RN, Trident Health’s chief nursing officer. “We believe patients will have a better understanding of the process and as a result will have a better experience in our ERs.”

 

“We understand that people have a choice in where they receive care and our goal is to continue to improve the patient experience at all of our facilities,” added Todd Gallati, the systems chief executive officer.

 

Lakewood, Colo.-based Healthagen, meanwhile, includes ER wait times on its iTriage app, which helps consumers first identify what condition they might have, then steers them toward the proper treatment. Aside from providing wait times, the app also gives users directions to the nearest facility and allows them to make an appointment.

Like ERtexting, Healthagen is also seeing interest from urgent care centers, which currently number about 9,000 in the United States. In March, the company signed a partnership with the American Academy of Urgent Care Medicine (AAUCM).