Why wait?

I leave work early to catch an earlier bus and try to make it to daycare on time to pick up my son. It's his 24-month pediatric checkup, I pick him up and we make it to the medical office with 10mins to spare so I take my time getting him out of the car. We check-in and we're told there'll be a short wait, the doctor is running behind on appointments. My son quickly starts to play with the handful of toys in the waiting area but he starts to get bored within minutes and we`re still waiting, 10mins turn to 30mins and we finally get sent to the exam room. Now with nothing but a diaper on, my son is roaming around the exam room, waiting to be weighted and losing his patience by the minute. Another 30min go by and finally the nurse comes to take the vitals, then another 30min go by before we see the doctor. As I try to keep my toddler entertained and myself calm, I can't help but think "why do we have to wait so long, when we booked the appointment months in advance?"?We finally leave to head home and quickly realize we spent over 2.5hrs for a routine checkup.

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As a busy parent whose every minute of the day counts, I question why is “wait” part of receiving health care in the first place. What if, in the future, we eliminate waiting/reception rooms – which take 10-15% of the overall space - and give back that real estate to clinical operations? I do recognize that we cannot radically eliminate “waiting” altogether and overnight, but in rural settings for example parking spaces could be upgraded with technology to accommodate waiting in car until the exam room is ready for a patient; while in urban areas we could use other parts of the building or public spaces, or even smaller/mini check-in areas, to direct patients into the exam rooms.?

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The real estate gained on the clinical end could be utilized to bring nature inside and integrate it into the health care delivery system (i.e. indoor central gardens). Alternatively, that space could be utilized to create more staff-centered spaces to increase employee retention rates, which in return would result in better services and happier patients. On a conservative spectrum, this real estate could be used to create more exam rooms or procedure rooms, which could increase the center's revenue (revenue that could be used to support the technological upgrades).?

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In the future, when I take my granddaughter for a doctor’s visit, I imagine I would receive a confirmation on my electronic device, which will prompt me to make a copay and update my information before I even leave my home. I would then drive to a multi-story parking building that reads my license plates and prompts me to take a designated spot on the same level as the doctor`s office. As we park, the car starts to wirelessly charge, and we get a notification on the screen in front of us within minutes that our doctor is ready to see us. We`d get prompted to walk to a designated exam room inside the main building, where a camera determines my niece`s height and temperature as she enters the room, the exam table measures her weight, and the doctor is already waiting in the room, and all this collected data is already in her records. We continue to discuss her early development stages, as she gazes outside the exam room window into a central garden with flowers that used to be the waiting room where me and her dad once waited.