Sloan MGH PATA
11-116
January 3, 2012
Massachusetts General Hospital's Pre-Admission Testing
Area (PATA)
Kelsey McCarty, Jérémie Gallien, Retsef Levi
Five anxious faces looked up at Dr. Jeanine Wiener-Kronish, chief of anesthesia at Massachusetts
General Hospital (MGH), as she entered the conference room. It was June 2009, and the group before her was the task force for the Pre-Admission Testing Area (PATA). PATA had been struggling with inefficiencies and long patient wait times for over two years. Despite the group’s best efforts to fix these problems, a letter forwarded from the president’s office that morning highlighted that conditions in PATA were not getting better. Dr. Wiener-Kronish took a seat and read the letter aloud:
Last week I brought my mother into the Pre-Admission Testing Area. We live almost 3 hours away and had to make a special trip for this appointment, which her oncologist, Dr. Paul Schneider, said was necessary to ensure a safe and successful surgery.
When we arrived at the clinic, the waiting room was so full, it was five minutes before my mother and I could get two seats together. We sat there for a full half-hour before they sent us back to get her blood pressure reading. We then waited back in the waiting room for another 45 minutes before being moved to an exam room. It was 20 minutes before a nurse finally came in and she mostly just asked questions I had already answered on a form provided by the front desk. After the nurse left, it was almost another half-hour before the doctor finally came in and he also asked many of the same questions. The providers were very nice and apologetic, but of the almost 4 hours we spent in the clinic, only 1½ hours of that was actually face time with anyone! Even more aggravating, while my mother was in surgery this morning, two families in the waiting room said their relatives never even had to have a PATA appointment. One even had the same condition as my mother so I’m not sure why our PATA visit was
even
January 3, 2012
Massachusetts General Hospital's Pre-Admission Testing
Area (PATA)
Kelsey McCarty, Jérémie Gallien, Retsef Levi
Five anxious faces looked up at Dr. Jeanine Wiener-Kronish, chief of anesthesia at Massachusetts
General Hospital (MGH), as she entered the conference room. It was June 2009, and the group before her was the task force for the Pre-Admission Testing Area (PATA). PATA had been struggling with inefficiencies and long patient wait times for over two years. Despite the group’s best efforts to fix these problems, a letter forwarded from the president’s office that morning highlighted that conditions in PATA were not getting better. Dr. Wiener-Kronish took a seat and read the letter aloud:
Last week I brought my mother into the Pre-Admission Testing Area. We live almost 3 hours away and had to make a special trip for this appointment, which her oncologist, Dr. Paul Schneider, said was necessary to ensure a safe and successful surgery.
When we arrived at the clinic, the waiting room was so full, it was five minutes before my mother and I could get two seats together. We sat there for a full half-hour before they sent us back to get her blood pressure reading. We then waited back in the waiting room for another 45 minutes before being moved to an exam room. It was 20 minutes before a nurse finally came in and she mostly just asked questions I had already answered on a form provided by the front desk. After the nurse left, it was almost another half-hour before the doctor finally came in and he also asked many of the same questions. The providers were very nice and apologetic, but of the almost 4 hours we spent in the clinic, only 1½ hours of that was actually face time with anyone! Even more aggravating, while my mother was in surgery this morning, two families in the waiting room said their relatives never even had to have a PATA appointment. One even had the same condition as my mother so I’m not sure why our PATA visit was
even