emergency room wait times through text messaging but for reasons that go beyond
driving patient traffic, according to healthcare technology company ER Texting.
Using ER Texting,
patients can send a text message to a dedicated SMS short code (4ER411) and
instantly receive a message in return which lists the emergency room wait times
for participating hospitals in their area. The application enables patients to
find hospitals with the shortest wait times using any mobile phone.
While the technology was originally
marketed as a means to drive traffic to emergency rooms, hospital executives
have discovered the added benefits of improved patient satisfaction and load
balancing. These are two of the additional reasons why the Hospital of Central
Connecticut (HCC) implements ER Texting services.
We know that information in the
hands of patients helps drive satisfaction,” said Jeffrey Finkelstein, chief of
emergency medicine at HCC. This service helps us to be transparent to our
patients, even before they arrive at one of our campuses.”
The system can be implemented for a
single hospital or a group of hospitals. ER Texting works with the hospital to
create a live wait-time feed. The hospital then incorporates the 4ER411 message
in its advertising campaigns.
When patients have an emergency,
they send a text message to 4ER411 and instantly receive a text message reply
which lists the hospital’s short wait time. Patients immediately determine
actual current wait times at local hospitals and go to the one that is
providing the shortest wait at that time.
Apart from utilizing the service to
advertise a hospital’s short emergency and/or urgent care facility wait time,
the ER Texting system also gathers and populates a database for participating
consumers–which can be used for outbound texting messages.
ER Texting provides texting services
to hospitals and urgent care facilities that want to post their emergency room
wait time and allow consumers to access those times via text message. By virtue
of its dedicated and highly recognizable SMS short code 4ER411, ER Texting
offers a complete, secure and integrated texting and marketing platform.
By TelecomLead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
