Willamette Valley Medical Center to Display Emergency Department Wait Times

Minutes matter when it comes to saving lives, and for this reason, Willamette Valley Medical Center (WVMC) is committed to providing high quality emergency care, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to our community. Part of this commitment involves keeping our community informed; we want you to know who to call, when to call, when to seek emergency care, when to call 9-1-1, and other potentially lifesaving information.

One specific way we are working to better inform you of our emergency care is through the regular publication of our average Emergency Department (ED) Wait Times on our website. Our expectation is that this information will better prepare you, if and when you need emergency care.

Meeting the benchmarks
To be eligible for this program, which is managed by our parent company, LifePoint Health, a leading healthcare company dedicated to Making Communities Healthier, WVMC first had to meet a set of three criteria:

• The ED must be open 24 hours each day.
• The ED must have sustained an ED wait time for Registration to Medical Screening Exam (MSE) at or less than the target wait time for two consecutive months, as verified by a monthly operations report.
• The ED must have sustained an average ED Length of Stay (LOS) for discharged patients at or less than the target for two consecutive months, as verified by a monthly operations report.

Because of the outstanding work our Emergency Department staff has done in meeting these criteria, we are pleased to report that we have maintained these expectations. Going forward, we will continuously evaluate and modify our ED processes to help us continue meeting these targets, ensure the delivery of high quality emergency care, and keep this new line of communication open to our community.

How it’s calculated
When you see a time, such as 14 minutes, displayed on our website, it is important to understand that this is a four-hour rolling average. Each person who enters our Emergency Department is tracked through a computerized system. The person’s registration time in the ED and “greet time”, which is the time when the patient is greeted by a qualified medical professional, are used to calculate the average wait times. The computerized system automatically averages the most recent four-hour time period, which is updated every 15 minutes throughout the day.

What to expect
The average wait time is accurate, reliable, and regularly updated. However, due to the natural flux in patient volume, it is possible for a person to experience a shorter, or longer, wait time in our Emergency Department than what is displayed on the website. Furthermore, patients are prioritized based on severity of the complaint or reason for the visit. This is why we use the four-hour rolling average; it minimizes variance by factoring in the natural ebb and flow of emergency departments.

At WVMC, our priority is to deliver quality care close to home for the people in our communities. We hope you find this new information helpful should you find yourself in the middle of a medical emergency.