As a proponent of value based health care in veterinary medicine, I am always intrigued by ways we could improve patient care learning from the human side.

Organizing the health care team around the patient’s clinical condition, with follow up throughout the whole cycle of care is a key component for value based care.

I found this article on eliminating waiting rooms in a health care organization very interesting. Their thought process is that by eliminating waiting rooms, they would improve health care team collaboration and patient experience. Furthermore, it could improve infection prevention.

I have not seen a vet hospital with no waiting room. Could we in veterinary medicine learn from this?

“The waiting room is nothing more than a temporary stock room, or intermediate warehouse for patients with billable conditions that feed exam rooms every 10–15 minutes …. No health care provider I know actually views patients as a packaged revenue opportunity, but the fee-for-service system has incentivized this warehousing behavior. “

“Rather than delivering patients serially to one exam room after another, each owned by a different provider, we made the patients the owner of their own rooms, and instead, circulated the providers to the patients.”