The waiting room at the emergency department in Steinbach now has a monitor which gives patients a bit of an idea as to how long they might be waiting.

Dr. Denis Fortier with Southern Health says in March, the Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) launched at the hospital. Under the new system, the emergency department at Bethesda Regional Health Centre has moved from pen and paper record keeping to computer data entry. The monitor in the waiting room is part of this new system.

"It doesn't give names, it doesn't say where you are in the queue," explains Dr. Fortier. "It just gives you averages of how much time the average person sitting in the waiting room at that time has been waiting."

The monitor displays how many patients are in the waiting room, how long most patients have been waiting and what the longest is that someone has been waiting. Dr. Fortier says they are working with the province and eHealth to see if this data could eventually end up on a website. But he says there is a bit of work to do before that can happen.

Bethesda was one of three hospitals in the region to move to EDIS. The other two are Portage Hospital and Boundary Trails. Dr. Fortier says it was a significant changeover requiring a lot of training. He notes there haven't been any major glitches or delays at Bethesda since the changeover but says today things are running considerably smoother than the first few hours and days.

"In the early days wait times would have increased as people were becoming familiar with the system," he says. "In the end though I think we're back to business as usual."

Two months have passed since the new system launched and Dr. Fortier says by the three-month mark they should have data which shows what an average wait time is at Bethesda.