If you had needed to travel to the emergency room of Maria Parham Health on Friday night at 7:30, your estimated wait time would have been in the single digits as evidenced by the screen grab of mariaparham.com you clicked on for this article.
Minutes matter when it comes to saving lives, and those minutes often matter to prospective patients who may need any form of care. “How long will I have to wait?” You’ve said or thought those words before.
Maria Parham Health not only wants you to know about receiving high quality emergency care 24/7, but the local regional medical center now seeks to better inform about average emergency department (ED) wait times.
On its web site and in an information release sent to WIZS, how the time is calculated and what to expect are spelled out.
How it’s calculated
“When you see a time, such as 14 minutes, displayed on our website or on the billboard, it is important to understand that this is a four-hour rolling average. Each person who enters our Emergency Department is tracked through a computerized system. The person’s registration time in the ED and “greet time”, which is the time when the patient is greeted by a qualified medical professional, are used to calculate the average wait times. The computerized system automatically averages the most recent four-hour time period, which is updated every 15 minutes throughout the day.”
What to expect
“The average wait time is accurate, reliable and regularly updated. However, due to the natural flux in patient volume, it is possible for a person to experience a shorter, or longer, wait time in our Emergency Department than what is displayed on the signage. Furthermore, patients are prioritized based on severity of the complaint or reason for the visit. This is why we use the four-hour rolling average; it minimizes variance by factoring in the natural ebb and flow of emergency departments. At Maria Parham Health, our priority is to deliver quality care close to home for the people in our communities. We hope you find this new information helpful should you find yourself in the middle of a medical emergency.”
(Maria Parham is an advertising client of WIZS. This is not a paid ad.)