Sitting at the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System cafeteria, in conversation with
Dr Amit Arwindekar on the newly renovated Emergency Department (ED) Facility, he shared about how they designed the newly renovated ED facility in a way that it considerably reduced the waiting room space, contrary to their previous ED layout.
Wondering how could hospitals be successful in doing that, he said that there existed facilities like “no waiting room ED's” too. The idea sounded bizarre until I actually started reading up on that front and learning about different hospitals across the country that had already started applying that decades ago. Before understanding about the success or failure of such modules, I was curious to know about where did it all start from and how the idea was actually applied.
So about 16 years ago, a Toyota ‘Sensei’ (master) inspired the Virginia Mason to change its system. Dr. Robert Mecklenburg, a physician at Virginia Mason met a Japanese master who worked at Toyota’s headquarters. The Sensei was curious about the physical treatment process in health-care and he was surprised to learn about the waiting room backlog. He was quite ashamed to learn about the patients’ long hours of wait.
This also was a realization for Dr. Mecklenburg as by making the patients wait and use up facilities like the coffee machines and internet, these charges had to be incurred by the patients themselves. Therefore there was a big shift in this system and the waiting rooms were eliminated. The patients were immediately ushered to the exam room on arriving and the nurses handled the rest! These efforts had improved patient satisfaction as it minimized the time between arrival and examination and it made the system more efficient.
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