NRHS emergency departments growing, improving

By Carol Cole-Frowe

Transcript Staff Writer

Serious aches and pains that required emergency attention used to call for a scary trip to the hospital and hours and hours in the waiting room and emergency department.

Much of that has changed in the past decade, and especially in the past few years. The reason for needing the emergency department may still be an unhappy occasion, but care from the time a 911 call is placed has gotten better and much, much faster.

Norman Regional Hospital System, which covers the Norman Regional Hospital and Moore Medical Center, has quietly become one of the busiest, most efficient and effective emergency departments in the region, according to the numbers and quality indicators.

"I feel pretty comfortable saying that we are probably the best in this region," said Dr. Robert Frantz, NRHS emergency medical director.

Last year, the Norman campus saw 65,114 patients in its emergency department, making it the third busiest emergency room in Oklahoma and among the top 3 percent of busiest emergency departments in the nation, Frantz said.

Norman's emergency department has a 34-bed major side and a 10-bed fast track, with double triage speeding the process and shortening waiting times. Registration is done bedside.

About 20 emergency physicians from Norstar Emergency Physicians have been employed since 2004 in the Norman ED, with an average physician coverage during 2007 of 72 hours per day. They saw an average of 2.49 patients per hour.

Add the Moore campus, which saw 20,787 patients in its ED in 2007, and you have an emergency system ranked in the top 1 percent among the busiest in the country with almost 90,000 patients annually.

Compare that to just five years ago, in 2003, when the Norman campus saw 51,073 patients in its emergency room.

The average stay in the NRHS emergency department is 83 minutes for patients treated and released, compared to about three hours nationally. That doesn't include time spent in the waiting room.

That time can vary depending on when the patient comes to the emergency department. The peak period daily is in the evenings, topping out at about 7 or 8 p.m. The slowest period in terms of number of patients is about 5 a.m.

In February, the system set new records for seeing patients, with about 6,500 people through the Norman emergency department, 3,000 in the Moore ED, 1,000 transported by EMSStat and 5,000 seen at Urgent Care centers.