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Comment by absconditus | Hacker News Reader

If you can afford to wait do you actually have an emergency? There are many other options, including clinics in drugstores, which don't burden emergency departments.

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I'm a father of 3 and this service would have been useful on several occasions. TRUE emergencies are handled VERY quickly at the ER, but there are a lot of times when the regular doctors office is closed (holidays, weekends, after business hours) but you REALLY need to take your sick child to get medicine or whatever. We've had more middle-of-the-night ear infections than I'd care to remember. :)

The drugstore clinics can certainly handle ear infections. There are also urgent care facilities in most areas that can be utilized.

I'm not sure what your qualifications are, but I've given mine -- a parent of 3 kids. Drugstores (in my area, anyways) are NOT able to handle ear infections because antibiotics require a physicians prescription. Urgent care facilities are always preferable to ER visits because they cost less for the patient and permit ER staff to handle true emergencies, there there are many instances where urgent care just isn't an option.

I'm not sure how being a parent provides qualification in assessing the practicality of this startup, but if it does, then I would like to weigh in on this issue as I am a parent of 2. These clinics are typically staffed at least by a nurse practitioner, who can treat and prescribe medications (depending on the state) for almost any reasonable non-urgent condition, including antibiotics. If you live in a state where the nurse practitioner can not prescribe medications, there is usually a physician on staff that works along side the NP to assist in those situations. These clinics sell themselves as being non-urgent care facilities that are able to treat conditions that otherwise would have required a physician or Emergency room visit. If they could not prescribe medications and treat most of these conditions, I am unsure how successful they would really be.

My guess is there are a lot fewer of these clinics and the majority don't have access to them.

There are 5,700 hospitals in the U.S.(AHA) and ~ 4,500 emergency rooms.

Do you know how many of these clinics there are?

As much as I love the InQuickER idea, it's not hard to predict which one of NP clinics and InQuickER is going to make a bigger dent faster. Clinics are going to be everywhere in ten years. It's too good a system not to succeed.

Of course, InQuickER (or something like it) is just going to integrate with the clinics and urgent care centers. I'm going to select "ear infection" and enter my zip code and it's going to give me a selection just like Orbitz.

As a point of reference, I've never heard of these clinics.

Drugstores in Illinois and (I thought) California can handle this problem, when they are staffed by nurse-practitioners (as many Walgreens are). NP's are the future of US health care.

The list is much larger.

For example here is the list of states which CVS operates clinics in:

http://www.minuteclinic.com/en/USA/Clinics.aspx

Here is the list of conditions they can treat:

http://www.minuteclinic.com/en/USA/Treatment-and-Cost.aspx

Note "treat and write prescriptions" in the very first sentence on the page.

Many drugstores have clinics staffed by clinicians who are able to write prescriptions. One does not need qualifications to obtain this information.

While you have a valid point, I think you're still missing the main issue: sometimes these clinics aren't open when you need them most. Emergencies big and small happen at any time during the day. Not many clinics and urgent care centers are open and easy to go to 24/7.

Do you honestly believe that I don't realize this?

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the visitors to this site believe that most problems have a technical solution. I happen to believe that this technical solution has the potential to exacerbate an existing problem and that other non-technical solutions are possible. What is needed is a combination of 24 hour clinics/urgent care centers, more fast-track departments and convincing certain people that there is no need to visit a doctor for a bad cold unless certain symptoms appear or one doesn't recover in a reasonable length of time. Encouraging more people to visit the emergency department for non-emergencies does not seem prudent to me.

My apologies if I was misinterpreting your replies as needless repetition.

I don't disagree with you, and it must be said I question the need for such a service...but given the state of waiting at emergency departments today, I could see how this is useful for those people with small emergencies that for whatever reason can't be dealt with elsewhere. For now. The long term solution would obviously be to do something similar to what you suggest.

I was merely trying to make the point that I see this as a useful service/start up. Perhaps 'qualifications' was a poor choice of word here.

The key phrase here is "middle of the night". How many areas have drugstore clinics that are open at 2am?

Better question, what is the likelihood that a hospital near most residents are busy enough at 2am where wait times are extremely excessive that you need to use a service like this to "schedule" your visit? I would imagine that the likelihood decreases considerably during the "middle of the night" especially when taking into consideration that there are probably more hospitals that are not level 1 trauma centers and/or county run facilities and are often the busiest between 11am and 11pm.

My last experience with the ER was in the 90s, but there were several times I (or my then wife) had to wait for hours in the evening or middle of the night to see a doctor at the ER, in both Columbus, GA, and Melbourne, FL.

This is a very good question, and a very complicated one. In many markets, retail clinics and urgent care centers are open 60 hours per week at best; nights and weekends, treatment options are scarce.

Additionally, many hospitals operate onsite "fast-track" clinics which are connected to the ED, so low-acuity conditions are essentially treated in something resembling a retail clinic.

Our goal is to make the emergency medical treatment experience as efficient as possible. Parents don't want to be sitting in the waiting room half the night, potentially exposing their children to contagious diseases in the er. Professionals lose valuable time to ER visits that drag on forever. We're trying to recapture that lost time and give the patients more control of the treatment process.

As yet another parent, this looks promising. My ER visits are usually in the 5-7 hour range. I also don't really care what the place is called: if I have an issue, I want to go to the closest place that can help me. If it happens to be the Walgreens three blocks away (it isn't), fine. Urgent Care, ER, trauma center or whatever.

Until recently, I always thought these places would triage, but my experience has been that it is just 'take a number and wait' I've been in with a broken arm, a torn nose (that required stitches) and couldn't believed we were treated exactly like a headache. So, this looks great. Try the Silicon Valley next so we can try it!

In addition to making emergency treatment more efficient, you're also providing valuable decision support to people in some of the most stressful moments of their lives.

Anyone who is scared enough or in enough pain to be considering an ER visit is about as far from a 'rational actor' as possible. Helping them make good decisions not only smooths out the system, it also gives people essential help when they need it most.

Nice job. :)

InQuicker specifically notes that they aren't for urgent or emergency conditions (http://www.inquicker.com/when_to_call_911). I don't see any reason why this couldn't be extended to non-hospital clinics, they work pretty similarly.

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