"No Wait" ER's

I love the title on this one, excerpted from The Journal News.

"Hospitals figure patients don't like to wait"

Hudson Valley is hoping that yesterday's opening of its new "no-wait" emergency room will attract patients who dread waiting a long time to be treated in other crowded facilities.

The hospital's emergency room overhaul is the first in a wave of emergency room expansions coming to Westchester that are designed to cope with a growing patient load and, if not actually eliminate emergency room waits, then at least reduce them and make them less stressful.

Among its improvements, the million-dollar redesign at Hudson Valley doubled the number of patient rooms and eliminated the need for patients to stop at a registration desk by introducing bedside registration on a wireless computer.

"Our patients have told us what they would appreciate most is eliminating the whole waiting period," said John Federspiel, the hospital's president.