Richardson Medical Center recently learned that they were recognized in a national publication Becker’s Hospital Review.
The topic of the review was the Emergency Department “Door-to-Diagnostic-evaluation” time. Becker listed the Top 40 hospitals in the United States where patients spent, on average, five minutes or less in the emergency department before they were seen by a healthcare professional.
These times are categorized under the “Door-to-Diagnostic-Evaluation” measure in Hospital Compares’ Emergency Department Care Measures dataset. The data were collected between April 2014 and March 2015 with the national average “Door- to- Diagnostic Evaluation” time being 24 minutes.
Richardson Medical Center had a 5 minute average time for a patient to sign in and be triaged by a medical professional. The diagnostic evaluation begins whenever a medical professional speaks to the patient to determine their medical concern or problem.
Becker’s gathers their information from mandatory Core Measure Reports that are submitted to Medicare by hospitals nationwide every month. Their studies cover a multitude of topics and quality care measures. This particular focus was not on length of stay in the Emergency Department, but average length of time from walking in the door to being seen by a medical professional.
CEO James W. Barrett Jr., stated, “Great strides are being made to improve the image of our Emergency Department; it is something that we work on in our organization every day. Reports such as this demonstrate by an objective third party that progress is being made by our ER staff to shorten the time spent by patients in our ER. There are certainly instances when waiting times are longer. But we strive to keep those to a minimum; if there is a significant wait-time it is due to the critical nature of other patients being treated. Being recognized on a national level for the effort to improve ER patient care is certainly something that we are all proud of.”