You know how long you will wait to ride your favourite roller-coaster at the amusement park, and the number of minutes you’ll spend standing until the next train pulls into the subway station.

Soon, you may know how long you will have to wait for care at your local hospital’s emergency department.

Last month, St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener became the first in the province to post real-time estimates for emergency room waits on its website.

Potential patients will know at a glance the number of people being treated, the number waiting to be seen by a doctor and the estimated time they will likely spend lingering in the waiting area. The information, which is updated every 20 minutes, also projects how busy the ER will get over the upcoming six hours.

Since launching six weeks ago, 16 other hospitals — five in the Toronto area — are looking into adopting the technology developed at St. Mary’s.

One hospital CEO was so taken with the initiative that he was sold on the idea in less than 15 minutes.

“The number one question we get in our emerg — and I think in probably every hospital’s emerg — is, ‘How long is it going to take to see a doc or nurse practitioner?’ ” says St. Mary’s president Don Shilton.

“If we could answer that question, we thought then the right thing to do for patients is to make that information available to them.”

The idea is that people who feel like they need to go to emergency room, but are not in dire health, can check the website from home to decide whether the estimated wait to see a doctor is acceptable. If it’s too long, they can choose to wait until the ER is quieter, drive to another hospital, opt to see their family doctor the following day or seek treatment elsewhere.

The website, which clearly states those who need immediate medical attention should call 911 or go to their nearest ER, lists alternate options for potential patients, including local walk-in clinics and urgent care centres.

“Patients can make better decisions if they have better information,” Shilton says.

In the first month, the website received 10,000 hits and hospital data shows about 87 per cent of patients are seen in less time than the estimate provided.

Registered nurse Beth Corbeil has worked in St. Mary’s emergency department for 10 years. She says the online estimates have been a huge help — for patients and for staff who are quizzed regularly on wait times. Now, patients either come to the ER knowing the approximate wait or are checking for updates on the monitor in the waiting area.

“It’s nice to have the tool because often people would be upset if we couldn’t give them an estimate, good, bad or otherwise,” Corbeil says. “Be it a short wait or a long wait, they just wanted to know.”

One patient she recently saw in the ER was not perturbed by the six hours she would likely wait to see a doctor; she had seen the estimated time online and brought a book to keep her entertained.

“She had quite legitimate health concern that day,” Corbeil says, “so I was happy to see she wasn’t deterred by the wait time and still came.”

Shilton explains the website is primarily for the 30 per cent of patients who need medical help, but not urgent care. These patients could include those with headache, something in their eye, chronic back pain or diarrhea with no other complications. Some of them do not have a family doctor, Shilton says.

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He admits there was some initial reluctance to post real-time ER waits so publicly.

“Not having it out there avoids you from being criticized,” he says. “There was some concern there might be a negative response, but for the most that hasn’t happened.”

Alberta Health Services is the only other Canadian health system to provide real-time wait estimates for its patients. Currently, Ontario hospitals report their average emergency room wait times once a month on a Ministry of Health website.

St. Mary’s has been using real time data to improve hospital operations since 2009. The information, which shows how patients flow throughout the hospital, from the ER to in-patient units, updates every five minutes and is used by administrators to mediate potential problems.

Shilton credits the influence of being in Waterloo Region — Ontario’s high-tech hub — for why St. Mary’s was the first to create such data-driven tools. The hospital set up a third-party company, called Oculys, to develop and market the software. All proceeds from the company are funneled back to the hospital’s foundation, which in turn funds patient care at St. Mary’s.

Franck Hivert, CEO of Oculys, says it took a year and at least a thousand hours of research to understand just how the emergency room handles patients and to create the complex algorithm used to predict wait times.

The 16 hospitals interested in adopting the software could have the system up and running within 60 days, says Hivert. He adds the cost is not prohibitive — less than $5,000 to start and a monthly subscription fee of around several thousand dollars, depending on the size of the hospital. (Oculys was reluctant to provide too much information given some hospitals were in contract negotiations.)

While it’s still too early to tell whether the tool will lower St. Mary’s overall emergency room wait times, administrators believe spreading out when patients arrive at the ER will help reduce bottlenecks and excruciatingly long waits.

Hivert says the long-term goal would be to have one website — whether for a region or the province — for patients to check to see ER wait times in their area.

“Then all of a sudden people can quickly make the best choice on where to go to get care.”