If you end up in the emergency room, the last thing you want is to sit around waiting for hours to be seen. You’d like to know you’re in good hands and that your health issue can be diagnosed and treated quickly. Thanks to a new partnership between Mercy Hospital and Emergency Medicine Physicians (EMP), a leading provider of emergency medicine services, people who visit the Mercy’s Emergency Department will experience fast treatment, high-quality care and reduced wait times.

“When people come through the door, there will be a physician right there in the waiting room,” explains Tim Corvino, M.D., director of physician services and operations for EMP. Dr. Corvino is also a staff physician at Mercy. “Working alongside a triage nurse, the physician will be part of the triage process and will see patients as soon as they arrive. That alone can help shave 60 minutes off a person’s length of stay.”

Focus on quality
Having physicians performing triage will also improve quality of care, Dr. Corvino explains. Many best-practice guidelines recommend treatment begin within a certain period of time—antibiotic treatment within four hours of hospitalization for people with pneumonia, for example. But if patients spend that precious time waiting to be seen, the best-treatment protocol can’t be followed, Dr. Corvino says.

Even if a patient is not yet in an examining room, he or she can be taken for tests as soon as the physician orders them. So if the doctor determines that a patient needs blood drawn or an X-ray, the patient can be taken directly from the waiting area for tests. By the time the person gets to an exam room, the physician will be able to review results without further waiting. “The faster we can evaluate patients and determine the right course of action, the better the care and the better the outcomes,” Dr. Corvino says.

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