Problem
Ontario’s emergency room (ER) wait times are at an all-time high. It results from a culmination of factors: an increase in visits to the emergency department, an aging population, and overwhelmed hospitals. These numbers are likely to keep rising as Ontario’s population is projected to increase by 30% in the next quarter century. Our system is under-equipped to handle this volume of patient influx, resulting in patients not receiving the timely, quality, care they deserve. Ontario’s ER wait time is a compounding problem that needs to be addressed.
Solution
Traditional solutions focus on internal hospital improvements, but their modifications are restricted to each facility and are quickly overwhelmed by rising patient numbers. Our approach offers a unique perspective by capitalizing on the large wait time differences (up to 2 hours) between hospitals in the same city, focusing on how we can spread out patients over a larger area to reduce the burden on individual hospitals.
Our solution is FLOW: a patient-centric app that combines live hospital wait times with driving time, offering a centralized platform where patients can easily find the fastest wait time. The app uses your location to create a list of results sorted from the shortest cumulative drive and wait times. Clicking on each hospital will show more statistics such as queue length. The ability to see both drive and wait time will revolutionize the way patients choose their hospitals and is the key to redirecting patient flow. It asks the question, would you rather spend 6 hours waiting at your local ER, or drive for 2 hours to a different hospital with a 1-hour wait?