A new web site – medwaittime.com – allows doctors to input when their office appointments are running late and warn patients accordingly. So rather than waste an hour in the waiting room, the patient can come at the later time. Bravo – if it gets used. Because doctors are so pressured by HMOs to see as many patients as possible, and that they don’t have to pay for our wasted time, I suspect that they would rather see us waste the hour in the waiting room and not risk a few minutes of empty time in the middle of the day and the few minutes it would take to input the appropriate delay information to the web site. That is the problem with the perverse incentives that our health care system is faced with.
What do you think???
1 comment:
Sound like a good idea but i think it will be hard to catch on... All doctors have to be on the website and all patient have to be able to access this information...Seems like the rollout would be very slow...I don't think it would gain momentum fast enough...
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