Canadian Hospital Walk-in Clinic To Start Texting When Doctor Is Ready To See You
I always have a big laugh when I see the Canadian healthcare system held up by US healthcare reformers as some sort of ideal system – it isn’t. As it stands my wife and I can’t find an available doctor in our home town which means we have to travel a 80 miles (each way) every month to see a doctor and then for anything more urgent it’s off to the walk-in clinic.
So when I saw this story out of Montreal, Quebec, about a hospital walk-in clinic that was trialling the use of texting to inform patients that the doctor will be available to see them within the next hour I just shook my head.
The idea it that rather than sitting in the waiting room for what usually ends up being hours, and hours, you can fork over $3 and the nurse will text you when the doctor is going to be available to see you, which means you can go off and do other things without losing your place in the line.
Sara Michaels, manager of the MDCM clinic said “We’ve had this system in place for only three weeks, but the patients are much less stressed, and we’re much more organized. The patients gain back their freedom. They don’t have to wait for four or five hours in a waiting room full of sick people. Instead, they can take a number, and then they can go out and do their groceries or whatever, and the system will alert them to come back. In a sense, it’s like coming in and asking for an appointment later in the day, something we couldn’t do before.”
via MobileSyrup
Yup, we have a fantastic healthcare system.
as a side-note the image of the hospital is the one in my hometown and was the first one to show up in an image search for ‘ontario hospital walkin clinic’
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Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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