Andalusia Health ranked nationally for short wait times in Emergency Departments

This week Andalusia Health was included in a list of the 59 emergency departments or ERs in the nation with the shortest wait times for patients.
The list of hospitals was published by the Becker’s Hospital Review in which sufferers spent an average of 4 minutes or less before being analyzed by a healthcare professional, in accordance to CMS’ Hospital Compare database.

Andalusia Health CEO John Yanes claimed in this ranking, the local hospital is competing with every other hospital in the country.
He said, “This isn’t just a ranking in our peer group, we are competing with everybody.”
“Door to diagnostic evaluation” measure was utilized by the Becker’s in Hospital Compare’s Emergency Department Care Measures dataset. The data was collected from the time period of April 2015 through March 2016.
The national average door to diagnostic evaluation time is twenty-two minutes. Andalusia Health’s is 4 minutes.
Many years ago, the emergency department of hospital changed its protocol for intake, director Amy Herrington stated. Sufferers now ring a doorbell, and are greeted by a health care provider.
Herrington said, “That person takes the patient instantly to a room. We have been capable to lower our wait times and get the patients what they need, which is to have someone look at them.”
The registration procedure has been shifted to the bedside, cutting out the paperwork part at beginning, and putting it in the middle and end of the emergency visit.
n 2016, Andalusia Health’s emergency department managed 21,899 visits, or an average of 2,189 for each of the department’s ten beds. Those visits average 59.9 each day.
While those figures seem high, Yanes claimed that they would have been higher if the hospital did not have a walk-in clinic.
He said, “We had 5,800 visits to the walk-in clinic previous year. If those had gone to the ER, I am not sure how we could have managed the volume.”
Ina accordance to the Herrington, the emergency doctors and staff bought in to the new procedure.
Herrington said, “They see that it assists our throughput. There are not several facilities who can see as many patients each year as we do. Our success is 100% them trusting the process, then seeing that it works.”
Yanes claimed that in addition to the immediate bedding policy, the hospital added extra monitors which assist physicians to monitor activity.
He said, “The physician might be on the computer, working on chart, but the monitor lets him or her know there is a sufferer waiting to be seen.”
Yanes appreciated the department for the teamwork that assisted them to achieve the benchmark.