Drive Thru Fast Food, Drive Thru Medicine?? Drive Thru TRIAGE in ED?????

If you want a quick take away lunch from McD without the hassle of parking your car, you can always get to their Drive Thru counter and get a your quick grab.

How about a Drive Thru for URTI, fever. etc?? Patients to Stanford University Medical Center is able to do that.



The findings of this novel approach of Drive-Through approach is published in Annals of Emergency Medicine January 18, 2010.

During a flu pandemic, emergency departments (EDs) may be overwhelmed by an increase in patient visits. Often, these patients who are crowding the EDs have to wait for hours for their turn to be seen. This will foster an environment in which cross-infection can occur between patients and staffs.

It was Dr. Greg Gilbert, of Stanford, who first came up with a model: a drive-through emergency room with physicians stationed where the cars pull up. The vehicles serve as self-contained isolation rooms, and doctors examine the patients at curbside or through the window.

According to the study (see also the story here),

• The drive-through reduced patients' length of stay by 1.5 hours compared with a traditional ER.
• The median length of an exam was 26, minutes compared with 90 minutes in the hospital.
• The physicians identified 100% of those playing the role of flu victims.
• Even car emissions weren't a problem.There were no significant increases in carboxyhemoglobin among the participants.

Sometimes, I am amazed of how a simple idea of observing activities of our daily living can be extrapolated and turned into a novel approach! Hmm....thinking out of the box!

Wonder which hospitals in Malaysia can have the Drive Through Triage counter for flu??? Already the compound of most hospitals are so full of cars......

The Drive Through counter seems a good idea to me, to "kill two birds with one stone":
- reduce patient waiting time
- reduce risk of cross infection of flu virus