Posted E.R. wait times: MountainStar Health Care

I just returned from a trip to my home state of Utah and I noticed these new billboards from a health care company MountainStar HealthCare.  I stopped and took a picture of one:

According to their website, the numbers on the left of each of the billboard is the wait time as defined by:

... the time it takes to see a qualified medical professional, defined as a Doctor of Medicine (MD), Doctor of Osteopathy (DO), Physician Assistant (PA) or Advanced Registered Nurse Practitioner (ARNP). 

ER wait times represent a four-hour rolling average updated every 30 minutes, and is defined as the time of patient arrival until the time the patient is greeted by a qualified medical professional. Patients are triaged at arrival and are then seen by a qualified medical professional in priority order based on their presenting complaint and reason for visit.

National average wait time is one hour, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). HCA hospitals strive to beat the national average.

I found these billboards pretty interesting because just a week before we had dinner with a friend and her family in Montreal and we discussed that the typical ER wait in Canada was several (7 or 8) hours long.  They saw a similar sign during a recent trip to Florida and were impressed with short wait time in the US.

I think the fact that the hospitals have seemed to be able to really focus on shortening wait time is great, but except for impressing Canadians, I'm a bit uncertain about why they have spent so much money to display the stats on a billboard. Is there really a lot of choosing going on as you decide which ER to go to?  If you have a life or limb threatening illness or injury, do you first ask yourself "hmmm, now which hospital will probably have a shorter wait time"?  Or do you just go to the closest one?  They also post the wait time online here and have an iPhone app to check wait times here - do they expect people to check these as they travel to the ER? 

MountainStar is competing in a market dominated by Inter-Mountain Health Care (IHC) one of the largest health care providers in the country, and so they have a TV campaign with the premise that "bigger is not always better" directly attacking IHC's size. The ER wait time billboard campaign seems to be using their operational capabilities as a marketing ploy (which I think is pretty cool), but I wonder if the low wait times due to excess capacity or low demand as opposed to just smart patient processing.  The fact that they are calling out IHC and trying to actively compete for patients makes me think that they have more of a capacity / demand problem then a unique operational capability (maybe I'm wrong).

If the campaigns are successful and the hospitals start to see more ER patients, will the wait time remain low? If not, will the billboards stay up? Also, a statistic is less impressive in isolation, i.e. I want a billboard that shows the current size of the queue, the percentage of occupied beds, the ratio of patients to doctors, the average number patients per hour, the standard deviation of the wait times, etc.I also want to know what the nearest competitor is doing on the the same metrics for comparison.  But, alas, I am never happy and I am a nerd.

What do you think of the ER wait time billboards?

Bike sharing service design

I just got back from a trip to Montreal were I was attending a management conference. We stayed at an apartment about 10 km from the conference so most days I took the metro, but on the last day I tried out the bike sharing system called bixi. I was impressed: it was easy, cheap, and fun.  Since I hang out with a bunch of operations management folks at the conference, we discussed how it must not be real easy to resuffle the bikes to make sure they are placed the were the demand is high at the right time - quite a operations research problem.

I read a related article today (here)  and thought the idea was worth noting.  The setup costs look lower, but the standardization of the bikes doesn't seem to exist which may mean higher ongoing cost (think Southwest Airlines has all the same type of place leads to lower fixing costs).  Also, I'm not sure about the suffling around of the bikes that happen in cities like Montreal that ensures a bike is where the demand is.  Still, an interesting service design:


The Social Bicycle System from Ryan Rzepecki on Vimeo.

Service Experience: Cemetery Edition

The Wall Street Journal reports:

To Attract Future Customers, Cemeteries Hold Parties to Die For

The video below does a fair job describing the idea. Basically, open up the cemetery to events that would normally happen in a park in an attempt to get future people to think about the cemetery when they have the need.

"It gets them into the cemetery, but not in a scary way, and if they have a nice experience, maybe they'll say, 'I want my family there,' " explains William F. Griswold, Jr., executive superintendent of Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, Conn., which holds regular scavenger hunts."

 The article pitches the idea as soley a marketing one, i.e., use these events to sell plots, but I think it sounds a little like a case of utilizing capacity of a fixed asset.  Just like using a kitchen to serve food all day instead of just dinner, cemetery have capacity as a venue for events that may include be more than just grieving and memorializing.

To be sure, the idea doesn't come with a bit of squeamishness.  What are your thoughts?

Service Innovation: Technology on your plate

The blog Experience Lab recently posted about the London Restaurant Inamo.  Although I can't say I've been, it sound like a cool place.  From Experience Lab:

 Inamo is a restaurant where “the control of the dining experience” is placed in the diners’ hands. Instead of customers being given a traditional paper menu and ordering with a waiter or waitress, they use an “interactive ordering system” to browse and select what they want to eat. 

 The menu is projected onto the table and is controlled using a trackpad on the right side of the table...

One of the best parts is that when you are choosing different options from the menu an image of the dish is projected onto your plate, which helps you get an idea of what it will look like. This is also useful if you want to show your fellow diners what you’re going to order.

Check out the video from the Wall Street Journal on Inamo as well.  As the video points out, it is a bit gimmicky, but it certainly adds to the experience of the meal. 

 

RFID's on your pants: Walmart takes the leap

The Wall Street Journal reported that WalMart is starting to put RFID "tags" on individual pairs of jeans and underwear:

Starting next month, the retailer will place removable "smart tags" on individual garments that can be read by a hand-held scanner. Wal-Mart workers will be able to quickly learn, for instance, which size of Wrangler jeans is missing, with the aim of ensuring shelves are optimally stocked and inventory tightly watched. If successful, the radio-frequency ID tags will be rolled out on other products at Wal-Mart's more than 3,750 U.S. stores.

"This ability to wave the wand and have a sense of all the products that are on the floor or in the back room in seconds is something that we feel can really transform our business," said Raul Vazquez, the executive in charge of Wal-Mart stores in the western U.S.

The article points out that there are potential privacy issues as well, but the final paragraph leaves us nerdy tech geek operations management folk begging for more:

Proponents, meanwhile, have high hopes for expanded use in the future. Beyond more-efficient recalls and loss prevention, RFID tags could get rid of checkout lines.

"We are going to see contactless checkouts with mobile phones or kiosks, and we will see new ways to interact, such as being able to find out whether other sizes and colors are available while trying something on in a dressing room," said Bill Hardgrave, head of the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas, which is funded in part by Wal-Mart. "That is where the magic is going to happen. But that's all years away."

Years away? Maybe.  We have had RFID technology for a long time and retailers have just now figured out how to make it affordable to use on individual SKUs.  The next stage maybe further still.

Dealing with excess capacity: camp edition

Often times services find novel ways to better utilize the high fixed costs that go into equipment or real estate. For example, a restaurant might start serving breakfast or begin catering in order to find additional income out of space. The Wall Street Journal reported on a a trend for summer camps to cater to wedding and parties. See the video below and read the article here.  If any one is considering this - I want to come!

Back Stage Magic

I liked this video - Disney gets it right again. Serving 500 to 100 people all at once is no small feat. Making sure that the food is all hot, but not overcooked, plated and served in a short amount of time takes a lot of preparation and coordination.