The New Health Dialogue

When the iPhone made its debut, we told you there would be a lot of "apps" for health. This week a Connecticut hospital launched a new application that caught our eye.

The Hospital of Central Connecticut, which has campuses in New Britain and Southington, allows patients to check the wait times (updated every five minutes) for each hospital's emergency department via iPhone. The application also provides patients with real-time directions to the hospital.

The idea is simple and straightforward, but it has the potential to help alleviate common emergency room inefficiencies (and perhaps even bring down costs from unnecessary ER use and crowding). Doctors stress that life threatening emergencies -- like heart attack symptoms  -- should still go to the closest emergency room or call 911 for an ambulance, and not pay attention to wait time warnings. But patients with less serious problems might actually get seen faster if they drive a few minutes longer to the less crowded ER. (We wonder too, if some people with non-lifethreatening injuries or illnesses might decide they can wait to see their doctor in the morning if they know they face a really long wait).

"If one emergency room is backed up because we've had multiple traumas or heart attacks and we're an hour or two behind and there's no wait on the other campus, it would help us out if people went to the other campus," said Dr. Jeff Finkelstein, chief of emergency medicine at the Hospital of Central Connecticut.

Several hospitals have started to post wait times on the internet -- for example, Middlesex Hospital offers “door to doc" wait times on its website for its emergency departments in Middletown, Essex and Marlborough.Central Connecticut went a step further with the phone.

"Where the danger lies in this is somebody's having a serious illness such as chest pain and maybe a heart attack, and if they went to a site and saw that there was an hour wait, for them to bypass that emergency department and go to another one could be dangerous to their health," warns Dr. David Seaberg, dean and professor at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and a board member for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

But Seaberg stressed that patients with severe conditions will continue to be seen first, regardless of the wait time, and should always call 911. According to Dr. David Saxe, chairman of the Middlesex Hospital department of emergency medicine, 25 percent of emergency room patients come by ambulance, 25 percent come by car and are deemed “appropriate emergencies” and the rest are considered “urgencies,” or conditions that have lasted many hours. He hopes that the less serious half of the patients will consider using the website.

The Hospital of Central Connecticut (its New Britain and Southington campuses combined) has more than 100,000 emergency room visits annually, making it one of the busiest in the state. They also claim the shortest wait times, saying that 90-95 percent of their patients are seen within an hour. We hope that new applications like this will continue to streamline and improve hospital activities in the future. ER crowding is more complex than this (see our paper on ambulance diversions and ER flow) and hospitals are doing some serious work on how they handle the flow of patients but a bit of help from a smart phone can't hurt.