SOUTHBRIDGE, Mass. – August 2, 2016 – Harrington HealthCare System has recently been cited as having the shortest emergency room wait times in the state.
A recent study by HealthGrove, a health news and information site with an emphasis on data-driven analysis, compared information from a Medicare survey from July 2014 to June 2015 on more than 4,000 hospitals across the nation.
The study focused on timely and effective care in emergency departments.
Harrington ranked as having the shortest wait time across several different categories.
The average time patients spend in the emergency room before being seen by a healthcare professional in Massachusetts is 35 minutes; the national average is 24 minutes, while Harrington’s time was just five minutes.
When calculating the average time patients with broken bones had to wait before receiving pain medication, Harrington’s score was 32 minutes, while the state average was 57 and the national average 54.
Harrington also ranked best for the average time patients spent in the emergency room before being sent home at 104 minutes, beating the state average of 161 minutes.
“Throughput is a team effort. It begins with extraordinarily skilled triage nurses, who quickly identify key issues so as to prioritize the sickest patients into the department first. Their ability to capture critical data up front means less time going over known facts for the providers,” said James Sullivan, M.D., chief of emergency medicine at Harrington HealthCare System.
“The next facet is competent, skilled clinicians who readily engage to the full spectrum of patients essentially from the moment the patient is placed in a room,” he continued. “If many patients arrive at once, we seek to place them in rooms immediately and triage or register them in the room.”
Dr. Sullivan added professional support from local EMS, ancillary departments like radiology, laboratory and respiratory, and leadership from the nursing floor staff (including intensive care, pediatrics, maternity, and psychiatry) create a systematic flow to move admitted patients through the system in an extremely timely manner, allowing the emergency department to utilize all of its beds virtually all the time.
The measures of timely and effective care, also known as “process of care” measures, as reported by Medicare’s Hospital Comparison, shows:
According to Medicare.gov, most of the measures of timely and effective care come from the data that hospitals get from medical records of their eligible patients, following standards for abstracting and reporting the information.
Harrington has emergency departments in Southbridge and Webster which, combined, see approximately 45,000 patient visits per year.
Wait times can be viewed 24/7 at harringtonhospital.org.
For more information on the Medicare study, visit hospitals.healthgrove.com.
Due to the nature of emergency room visits, there may be circumstances in which patients are waiting longer than the noted average times.
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