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American Morning
Some Hospital ERs Promise 30 Minutes or Its Free
Aired August 09, 2002 - 08:32 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Thirty minutes or its free. It's not a guarantee from Dominoes, it's a new mantra for some hospitals around the country. They are using print and TV advertising to bring more patients to their emergency rooms, but could this rush to provide care be harmful? We're joined now by our own medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta.
Good morning, doctor. How are you doing?
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.
ZAHN: Do you think this thing works?
ZAHN: It looks like it is working. They've actually studied it. People don't like to wait, especially Americans, they just don't like to wait. Combine that now with hospitals becoming bigger businesses, focusing more on businesses, and you get advertising directly to consumers, directly to potential patients.
Let's take a look at some of them.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA (voice-over): One out of every five people has had to go to the emergency room.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What the hell are all those people doing out there?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Sick, I guess.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, thank you for that astute and penetrating observation, Frank. Why aren't they being seen by doctors?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GUPTA: You may have asked yourself the same question if you've ever been to the ER. Many of us think of nothing but long waits and overcrowding. But now promises of fast delivery aren't just limbed to your pizza. Some hospitals are guaranteeing faster wait times, and they're telling you about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Any time you have an emergency, so do we. You have the Highland Medical Center guarantee on it. You'll be seen in 30 minutes, or your ER visit is free.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GUPTA: Some hospitals are offering guarantees of limited wait times of 30 minutes or less, and it's worked.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Emily...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bingo.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... Haynes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ooh, tough break.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GUPTA: Since Oakwood Health Care Inc. rolled out an emergency room guarantee that promised movie tickets and a personal apology to patients not seen by a doctor in 30 minutes, have seen a 50 percent in patient volume.
Northern Nevada Medical Center, it gives you a 15-minute guarantee, or your ER visit is free.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They got right to the bottom of my shoulder problem, and I got back to the top of my game.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GUPTA: Located near the vacation town of Lake Tahoe, their ad campaign takes a more active approach in advertising. They've seen a 54 percent increase in patient volume since the ad campaign began. With such clever ad campaigns and offers, including free ER visits, movie and restaurant gift certificates, some may see the 30-minute guarantee as merely marketing ploys.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A new approach to emergency care, diagnosis within minutes, faster more complete care, with less wait and less worry.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GUPTA: But the American Hospital Association says the ER guarantees force hospitals to be more efficient in registering patients, treating them and moving them along for additional care.
And while much of patient volume relies upon doctor referrals, the ER is one of the only places where hospitals can control admissions and revenue. Ads are important to these hospitals, which are often small in size or close to competing medical centers. Hospitals know they cannot create emergencies, but that patients have a choice. The increase in volume seen after ads are often patients who might have otherwise gone to competing hospitals.
While the American Hospital Association does not track these ads, it says that hospitals know their communities' needs best.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: And the average wait time in an emergency time in the United States, about 60 minutes; 103 million people visit emergency rooms every year, and most of the people are between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. That's the busiest time in the emergency room. And the total ER time visit time is usually about 2:40 -- Paula.
ZAHN: Do you have any idea what percentage of those patients are those who don't have insurance and are relying on the emergency room for their primary care?
GUPTA: That's interesting, because that's a pretty common sort of thinking that lot of the patients that come to ER, the overcrowding is due to people who don't have insurance. Only about 10.7 percent of folks are nonurgent visits, and the Emergency Physician college finds that most patients don't use the emergency rooms as primary care. That's not the usual problem in terms of overcrowding. It has to do with the whole hospital structure, lack of in patient beds, lack of specialists that can see the patients in the emergency rooms, things like that.
ZAHN: So then who is the strongest voice against these guarantees of whether it's 15 minutes, like you mentioned, Lake Tahoe, or 30 minutes at some of these other hospitals, to be seen?
GUPTA: Well, there are a lot of physicians that have come out and said that a hospital should not be advertising that way at all. The American Hospital Association, we actually asked them, and they were sort of a little mixed, although not really against this. They said the ER is often the face of the hospital. Oftentimes ERs don't make money, yet they recruit patients to the hospitals overall. If they can be more efficient by streamlining registration programs, things like that, that's probably a good thing.
ZAHN: Sanjay, there is a real disturbing story out of Massachusetts this morning, that you, as a practicing doctor, I want to react to. Apparently, a Boston surgeon who was doing some spinal surgery left his patient in an anesthetized state to go out to get some cash from the bank. Have you ever seen anybody leave a patient in the middle of surgery to run any errand?
GUPTA: No, not to run errands, Paula. That's certainly, I think, no one would argue that that was in any way condonable. But, you know, what happened I think in this particular case, this surgeon actually had another surgeon in the room who was not scrubbed. I was sort of following this story along. That surgeon did not know how to do spine surgery. This particular surgeon seemed very distracted from everything I have heard. He was calling to find out when his paycheck would actually arrive at the office, and then subsequently left and cashed that check so he wouldn't bounce other checks, or something like that. That's just a poor judgment call on his part. I have just not seen that.
I will say that these spine cases can take a very long time, sometimes 12, 15 hours. So it's not uncommon for surgeons to actually step out of the operating room, change into a different pair of scrubs, cool down, get some food, something like that, but to actually leave the hospital with a person under anesthesia, I don't know what to say about that; it's obviously a very poor judgment call.
ZAHN: That's what the board is saying who runs the hospital, that he exercised remarkably horrible judgment. He's a graduate of the Harvard Medical School, and apparently Dr. David Arndt can't practice in Massachusetts until further order of the board. And you think that's appropriate, don't you?
GUPTA: Yes, and a lot of those state boards -- while it is Massachusetts, those state boards do communicate, so I bet he won't be able to practice anywhere in the country, based on what the Massachusetts board is saying.
ZAHN: It's a weird one. Thank you, Sanjay. Appreciate it.
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