If you’ve gone to an emergency room at any time in the past, you likely know many of the problems that patients face in such a medical setting. While of course emergency rooms are ideal and necessary for true medical emergencies, going to your local emergency room for a lesser medical concern or complaint can be far from ideal at the end fo the day – and this is the case for a number of different reasons.
For one thing, emergency rooms are often overcrowded and understaffed, with doctors spreading themselves as thin as is possible to meet the needs of all of their patients. For the typical non-emergent patient in any given emergency room throughout the country, an hour’s wait or more is to be expected. The typical patient will also likely need to wait considerably longer as tests are taken and the results are processed, a process that, in and of itself, can be hugely time consuming.
Emergency room visits can be prohibitively expensive as well, leading many people to simply ju