Emergency? Wait No More!

Queens Ledger
Thursday, October 02, 2008

St. John’s Introduces New, Fast Moving ER

It has been a long-held belief in New York City that the worst part of any serious injury is neither the immediate pain nor the slow recovery, but the wait at the emergency room.

Those that seek medical treatment in the event of an emergency often endure waiting room stints of more than six hours as they anticipate an encounter with a doctor.

In response to these lengthy and unpleasant hospital visits, St. John’s Hospital on Queens Boulevard has taken advantage of a non-traditional emergency room that can move patients in and out of the hospital in a fraction of the time it once took.

The new waiting room was the key feature on display at last Friday’s hospital open house, a meet-and-greet that connected St. John’s doctors and administrators with members of the community.

The new emergency room is just one of a number of big changes the hospital has made in an effort to increase their standing among New York City hospitals, improvements that include the acquisition of new CAT scanning technology and certification as stroke center.

“We’re making a number of concrete and invisible changes to St. John’s,” said Executive Director Anette Hastings, “and our most aggressive change is our approach to our emergency department. We’ve taken the wait down from six hours to one and a half.”

Hospital officials described the current wait time for emergency services as problematic, saying that patients would regularly grow frustrated and leave, often against medical advice.

A traditional emergency room consists of a waiting room, registration desk and triage desk, where nurses conduct a preliminary medical screening that identifies what treatment should be administered.

At St. John’s new emergency room, patients are brought to the waiting room, where they are asked five short pre-registration questions before they are taken to a private hospital room for bedside registration and triage.

After treatment and tests are administered, the patients are moved to a third room, the discharge center, where they can wait for IV’s, x-rays, and prescriptions.

“It’s a very fluid environment that keeps people moving from room to room and eventually out the door,” said Emergency Department Director Victor Politti. “For the last several weeks, our waiting room has been virtually empty.”

The restructuring of the emergency department was guided by Emergenuity, a consulting company that helped develop the new concept in emergency rooms.

Though there are a number of companies working to create similar types of emergency rooms across the country, Todd Warden, an Emergenuity consultant who worked with St. John’s, said that this was the first of its kind in New York City.

“I don’t know of any others in the city,” he said. “It’s an idea that hasn’t yet been embraced by the larger medical community.”

Since the new emergency room opened in June, St. John’s has seen their patient satisfaction scores, as rated by medical consultant Press Ganey, improve by more than 20 points, and only 20 of the hospital’s 3,517 patients in the last month left without being seen.

“Right now our door to drug is averaging at 30 minutes,” said Dr. Polliti. “We’re trying to make your visit as painless as possible. Patients like the way it’s going.”