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Greece has curbed waiting times for emergency services in its public hospitals by implementing an electronic system to track patients using bracelets.
Health officials said the programme has changed the state of emergency care in the 10 hospitals where it has been implemented. They plan to expand the system to additional hospitals in the coming months.
When patients arrive at one of these hospitals’ emergency departments, they receive a ticket – a wristband or bracelet – that bears a QR code that they will use in all stages of the medical service.
Hospitals use the bracelet system to screen patients for the severity of their medical problem and then prioritise these cases accordingly. When patients scan their QR codes, they can find out how many people are in front of them in the queue and their estimated waiting time.
In May, the Evangelismos General Hospital in Athens became the first facility to start using the bracelets in its emergency room. It has cut waiting times from nine hours to just over five hours, which remains the longest wait time. Patients with life-threatening issues do not face waits.
Aghia Sophia Children’s Hospital had the shortest waiting time, at just under two hours.
The average service time in the 10 hospitals involved with the project is four hours. More than 44,000 patients have been treated at these facilities between mid-May and mid-July, health officials said.
Waiting times are generally shortest for radiology (15 minutes), followed by surgery and cardiology (about one hour each) and pathology (less than two hours on average).
In hospitals where the new system has been implemented, calm and order prevails, as patients know when their turn is coming and where they will go, according to Health Minister Adonis Georgiades.
The bracelets will next be rolled out in four more hospitals before launching in another 10 by the end of September. By February 2026, it will be implemented in 100 hospitals, officials said.
Around November, the electronic patient tracking system will move to another phase. There will be a platform to track waiting times in hospital emergency departments.
Officials aim to collect real-time data on what is happening in the emergency rooms so they can intervene in cases of excessive delay, and so patients know the average waiting time in each hospital.
Notably, the bracelet system has not fixed every problem. About 30 per cent of patients who seek emergency care should would not have to go to the hospital if the country’s primary health care system was fully operational.
Approximately 17,000 patients who received bracelets through the new programme should not have been in the emergency room in the first place, officials said.
