David Van Sickle » Uncategorized http://davidvansickle.com Medical anthropologist, asthma epidemiologist Wed, 18 Aug 2010 05:07:58 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Only half of specialist referrals ever happen http://davidvansickle.com/2010/04/only-half-of-specialist-referrals-ever-happen/ http://davidvansickle.com/2010/04/only-half-of-specialist-referrals-ever-happen/#comments Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:50:13 +0000 admin http://davidvansickle.com/?p=337 Indiana Univ study shows that only 71 percent of patients age 65 or older who are referred to a specialist are actually scheduled to be seen by that physician. Furthermore, only 70 percent of those with an appointment actually went to the specialist’s office. Thus, only 50 percent (70 percent of 71 percent) of those referred to specialist had opportunity to receive the intended care.
]]> http://davidvansickle.com/2010/04/only-half-of-specialist-referrals-ever-happen/feed/ 0 My ER Wait Times Experiment http://davidvansickle.com/2010/02/my-er-wait-times-experiment/ http://davidvansickle.com/2010/02/my-er-wait-times-experiment/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:04:05 +0000 admin http://davidvansickle.com/?p=285 Last year, I became interested in emergency room wait times when a family member needed medical attention but did not want to spend his day waiting for treatment.

I had recently seen an article about the growing number of hospitals publishing their wait times online, but since that information is scattered across multiple sites, I found it a challenge to quickly compare and evaluate wait times in a given geographic area.

In addition, I found that there was no mechanism for people to independently report how long they waited to be seen by a physician.

As an experiment, I built ERwaittimes.us to aggregate current wait times published by hospitals nationwide and to provide a way for people to add their own wait times for every emergency room and urgent care. So far, it’s just a simple site that needs a lot more development. Please let me know what you think of the idea and how it could be improved.

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