The Waiting Room Project
The Waiting Room Project (WRP) is an opportunity to harness technology to not just educate, but actively engage patients during a time that commonly is just spent waiting many hours for ED care at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Patients are no longer just passive listeners, but collaborative participants in improving their health. This project fuses implementation science and innovation to improve care coordination across multiple departments, by engaging all users from the acute ED setting to the ambulatory setting. Our goal is to integrate into the ED workflow, a patient-driven tool that increases access to care, enhances patient experience and improves health system literacy.
An initial prototype can be seen here:
I came up with this idea because as a medical provider, I was having difficult time understanding the complexity of our health system. If I didn't know how to help my patients get to the next step of their care, I couldn't expect from my patients to figure out how to navigate it on their own.
Currently, the WRP is only a one-way tool where patients drive what they want to learn, but eventually we want to incorporate holistic engagement. We can engage our patients by addressing not just their medical needs, but also their social, insurance and health literacy needs through responsive and interactive tools such as the WRP. Recognizing our diverse population needs at a county, safety-net hospital, we will employ interactive, advanced two-way features to notify providers which additional post-ED visit services are needed and equip providers to assist. If patient is looking for alcohol cessation, the tool can notify the social worker to begin those discussions. If a patient comes for low-acuity complaint, we can show them how to get a primary care appointment in the future. We can provide discharge instructions in different languages or show videos that explains how to self-care (eg. wound care, hypertension reduction). We want to provide a virtual child life specialist and build an informed consent section for commonly done procedures.
Patients come to the ED for all different types of needs. We should embrace these opportunities to help direct patients to the right place and right care. The WRP is building our health system’s capacity to help patient drive their discharge care experience, connect the dots and navigate our complex health system, and unify a holistic team to help solve what patients need most and get them to the next step of their care.