How to Improve the Experience of Waiting (When You Can’t Reduce Wait Times)

Why is waiting so stressful for patients?

Nobody enjoys waiting. But for patients, it can be excruciating.  

It’s one thing to wait for something you’re looking forward to, like a nice dinner or an amusement park ride. Our tolerance for waiting in line is higher at Disney than it is at the grocery store. 

But patients are waiting for something less pleasant, like highly anticipated test results or relief from pain. They aren’t electing to spend their Friday in a healthcare facility — they’re probably visiting out of necessity.

And their pain, discomfort, and heightened anxiety make waiting all the more uncomfortable.

How to improve patient wait time 

What can hospitals and outpatient clinics do to improve patient perceptions of waiting? Reducing wait times is a start to solving the problem. 

Human-centered design can help reduce wait times

Streamlining workflows and improving internal communication can help your staff deliver care more efficiently and decrease patient wait times.

Use the human-centered design framework to:

• Properly frame the problem (understand all aspects of the issue)
• Identify what’s causing long wait times
• Collaboratively design solutions with all stakeholders: staff, patients, and administrators

Everyone plays a role in the patient waiting experience. Human-centered design methodologies can facilitate conversation around the issue and potential solutions.

Use human-centered design to improve the waiting experience 

The challenge of wait times goes beyond simply reducing the minutes spent in a waiting room or the days spent waiting for test results. Improving the experience of waiting is just as important as reducing the wait duration.

To improve the patient waiting experience, start with an authentic understanding of the end user. Speak with patients and listen to their perspectives:

• How does the experience make them feel? 
• Which specific elements are causing frustration? 
• What would make the waiting experience more tolerable?

These conversations provide more context than what you could glean from a patient satisfaction survey. Open-ended questions give you the full story behind a 1 out of 5 rating, revealing the “why” behind the low satisfaction score:

• “After an hour without an update, I thought they forgot about me.”
• “I only took a half day off of work for the appointment, and was anxious because I didn’t know if I’d be back in time.”
• “I had to use the restroom, but I didn’t want to miss my name being called and lose my place in line.”

Taking a human-centered approach to problem-solving also helps you focus on the most impactful areas for improvement and uncover the most promising solutions.

Meaningful, effective solutions are driven by real human needs — not assumptions.

What patients really want (besides shorter wait times)

You might be thinking, “That all sounds great, but I know what our patients want — shorter wait times — and we aren’t able to give that to them.”

Even if your hands are tied with wait times, there’s still more that can be done to improve the patient waiting experience. 

Studies around the psychology of waiting have shown that people feel better about waiting when they’re given a sense of control, the feeling of progress being made, and a comfortable waiting environment. 

Give patients a sense of control

The most difficult part of waiting is the unknown. When people don’t know how long they’ll wait, the wait feels longer — and to a certain point, it becomes unbearable. 

In an emergency department setting, patients can wait several hours before being called back. When this happens, patients don’t see the incoming ambulances and severe cases causing the long wait. They see the hour hand on the clock continuing to move, while they sit, waiting in frustration.

Unexplained waits are longer than explained waits.
- David Maister, The Psychology of Waiting Lines

Keeping patients informed about expected wait times, delays, and circumstances of the wait can significantly reduce their anxiety. Even if you can’t tell them exactly what’s going on, can you share how many rooms are full, or how you’ll determine when they’re seen? 

The worst thing you could say is nothing. Giving patients information lets them feel more in control and less anxious.

Create a feeling of progress

Another challenge with waiting is not being able to see the progress being made behind the scenes. When patients wait for 30 minutes without an update, it feels like they’ve gotten no closer, despite all the time they’ve lost sitting in the waiting room. 

In healthcare, it’s difficult to give exact wait times. And giving an estimate can be risky. If the wait extends beyond your estimate, it backfires and makes the experience even worse.

Updates at key touchpoints can help patients feel like they’re getting closer at each moment, rather than waiting indefinitely. Don’t just tell people their place in line — explain the next steps of the process and what needs to be done before it’s their time. For example:

• “Your lab results are being processed.”
• “Your doctor has one more patient before you.”
• “We’re preparing your room now.”

Provide a comfortable waiting room experience

In a study of perceptions about wait times, 63% of patients shared that a comfortable waiting area would make the experience less frustrating. 

This isn’t groundbreaking. Many hospitals and healthcare facilities have added TVs, more comfortable chairs, and hot beverage stations to their waiting rooms in an effort to improve the patient waiting experience. 

But don’t make the mistake of assuming that this is enough — or that every patient wants those things. To really understand your patients’ needs and frustrations, ask them. 

In a project with OhioHealth, we did just that. Our journey mapping and design thinking workshops with patients led to the creation of a comfort cart with items like phone chargers, playing cards, blankets, and hygiene products. The comfort cart made the difference between patients feeling abandoned vs. attended to and valued.

Here is a link to read the full OhioHealth case study

Why wait to improve patient experiences? 

Waiting is inevitable in healthcare, but frustration doesn’t have to be. Take a human-centered approach to design waiting experiences that give patients a sense of control, help them see the progress, and improve their satisfaction — even when it isn’t possible to shorten the wait. 

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