Adena Regional Medical Center in Chillicothe, Ohio, has implemented several changes since the start of the year that have lowered the average emergency department wait time to between five and six minutes.
ED process changes were led by Chief Clinical Officer Shaheed Koury, MD, who started working with Adena Health earlier this year. Among the changes made include having patients undergo a workup as soon as possible after arrival. That entails handling initial lab work, getting initial medications to the patient and getting them into a treatment room within six minutes.
Since these changes were implemented nearly four months ago, patients are consistently seen by a physician or advanced practice provider within 12 minutes of arrival. That's down from an average of 45 minutes in 2022. This has had a domino effect on other key ED metrics: The average length of time a patient needs to remain in the ED has fallen by about 30 percent and the left-without-being-seen rate has fallen to less than 1 percent. On the patient experience side, negative comments on surveys have dropped 18 percent.