I stumbled across this neat website, ERStat.ca, to track wait times across Canadian hospital emergency rooms. The site was created by Canadian software develop Jason Turnbull and appears to have launched sometime in the past few months.
I’ve thought about creating my own version of this concept for the past year or so, but it’s a daunting task because the Canadian healthcare data ecosystem is extremely fragmented, incomplete, and inconsistent, as I have written about before. So I’m glad someone else has gone ahead and done it. It’s an impressive effort.
As the site points out, there just is no rear-real time data for a lot of hospital; whole provinces are missing from the site. The creator also goes beyond just aggregating information, with a page proposing an ER transparency standard and another advocating for virtual ER waiting rooms. There’s even a portal for hospital employees to sign up and report information related to their ER.
Some of the text on the site is obviously and annoyingly AI-generated, but otherwise it’s a great effort. If nothing else, it lays bare another big gap in Canadian healthcare data that is properly the work of the federal government to solve.