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Mike Carter is engineering better access to health care

You twisted your ankle at four in the afternoon. Now it’s midnight and the ankle is twice its normal size. You know you should go to the hospital emergency, but you also have a good idea that you’ll have to wait…and wait…and…

But what if you could call the emergency ward and be told how long you would have to wait to be treated? And what if your name could then be put on a waiting list, guaranteeing you a spot?

Industrial engineering professor Mike Carter thinks this is entirely possible.

He and master’s student Pamela Chan (above, left) are working with Dr. Tom Chan (above, right), Medical Director and Chief, Emergency and Urgent Care at The Scarborough Hospital in Toronto on this very possibility. “It’s never been done before anywhere. But it’s not tricky. You just need to have the right statistical information. Right now, emergency staff are generally reluctant to say much about wait time. They may tell you your wait will be at least three hours. It’s more difficult to say it’s going to be between three and four hours. But we’re close to having models that narrow the gap.”

Carter, founder of the Centre for Research in Healthcare Engineering, has an impressive 18-year record of success. He has predicted Ontario demand for hip and knee replacement surgeries, modeled the impact of colorectal cancer screening and reduced EMS ambulance delays in Toronto.

Does he have a secret formula? “We scrounge around to find useful statistics, such as historical data on people who use the emergency, staffing levels throughout the hospital and how many major trauma cases come in. From all that, we create predictability models. Health care policy is typically made without quantitative support because they don’t have the models. But we’ve proven that combining mathematical models based on real statistics and clinical experience can improve health care service.”