Sault Area Hospital has launched a new pilot program designed to reduce crowding in its emergency department by allowing patients with non-urgent conditions to wait at home. Dubbed the Virtual Home Waiting Room, the initiative aims to improve the patient experience and increase departmental efficiency by scheduling arrival times for those with minor ailments. A better experience for patients and staff The program allows patients to register online and join a virtual queue, receiving text updates until they are notified to come to the hospital. “By having them come when we have the resources and space to take care of them properly, it is better for patients, better for the staff and better for the overall care they receive,” said Dr. Stephen Smith, an emergency department physician and the hospital’s vice-president of medical affairs. Smith said the unpredictable nature of emergency care often leads to long waits for those with less severe issues. “The emergency room is a very unpredictable environment, and our priority is, of course, always the highest acuity patients,” he said. “We don’t want low-acuity patients to have to wait a large amount of time in our waiting rooms because they can be very crowded -- and crowding, of course, as we know from the pandemic, can lead to a greater risk for infection and also decreases patient satisfaction and reduces our overall efficiency.” How the virtual queue works The pilot program is available to patients more than three months old who have a device capable of receiving SMS texts. It is specifically for those with minor medical complaints, including: “The patient can log on to our website and if they are eligible, they can register online and join the queue,” Smith said. “They’ll then receive, every hour, a notification that we acknowledge their wait and then they’ll receive a notification that we’re ready for them and they should start to proceed to the emergency room to be seen.” He emphasized that the program doesn’t allow patients to skip the line. “When they’re told to come to the emergency room, that is the most opportune time to minimize their wait ... But it’s not an opportunity to skip the existing queue,” said Smith. Early results and future goals The virtual queue, which has been in development for roughly two years, is limited to 10 patients per day. Officials are encouraged by initial results. “We’re only one day into this project and the patients who did use it, we did an average of an hour at home,” said Smith on Wednesday. “Then when they joined to be seen in the emergency room, they joined our usual queue and our average wait times have been around three hours.” Hospital officials said the concept was adapted from other industries. The hospital is seeking feedback from users to improve the system. Smith told CTV News he hopes the pilot could eventually be replicated elsewhere. “This is a pilot. We’re using it for a small number of patients, just 10 patients a day initially,” he said. “We would love to see something like this roll out into the community and we would love to be engaging some of our community partners in the future.”
