Baystate Mary Lane Hospital Offers 30-Minute ER Pledge

WARE — Emergency medicine is all about providing highly skilled, essential care without undue delays. Nevertheless, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office, emergency-department wait times continue to increase both in Western Mass. and throughout the country.

Research from Press Ganey Associates, a group that works with healthcare organizations to improve clinical outcomes, found that in 2009, patients admitted to hospitals waited an average of six hours in emergency rooms. Even worse, nearly 400,000 patients waited 24 hours or more. When essential care is delayed, even in the best institutions, outcomes worsen.

“Baystate Mary Lane Hospital is committed to turning around this trend and to providing rapid response times to patients needing emergency care,” said Dr. Richard Gerstein, chair of Emergency Medicine at BMLH, noting that the hospital has instituted what it calls a “30-minute pledge” to see every patient within 30 minutes of their arrival at the facility.

“The 30-minute pledge reflects our ER’s ongoing goal to deliver excellent care as efficiently as we can, each and every time you need it,” he said.

“Our 30-minute pledge is our commitment to make speed and efficiency an essential ingredient of emergency care through ongoing analysis of all our processes,” added Lynn Garreffi, nurse manager of the Emergency Department, noting that the 30-minute pledge is the result of teamwork across all departments within the hospital. “Through a collaborative process involving every department, we have adopted principles and techniques to reduce wait times, provide faster turnaround times for lab work and diagnostic testing, and enhance the movement of patients through the various phases of their hospital care.”

Gerstein noted that “actual ER wait times may vary depending on the urgency of care required by specific patients in the department. While our ER pledge is to see every patient within 30 minutes, the most critical health emergencies will always receive top priority. Even so, we estimate that we can meet this pledge 80{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} to 90{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} of the time.”

Baystate Mary Lane Hospital’s Emergency Department has enrolled with iTriage, a smartphone-based application for Android and iPhone, to continually provide, in real-time, its actual ER waiting time. It is the only facility in the area to provide this new service.

Along with Baystate Mary Lane’s efforts to improve efficiency, delivering the highest-quality care remains the hospital’s number-one goal. The BMLH Emergency Department is the recipient of the 4-Star Award from Professional Research Consultants (PRC), recognized for being in the top 25{06cf2b9696b159f874511d23dbc893eb1ac83014175ed30550cfff22781411e5} of hospitals across the country for patients’ satisfaction with their overall quality of care. These results were benchmarked against more than 500 other hospitals and service areas in the PRC national database.