No one likes waiting in line. Not at the grocery store. Not for haircuts. And especially not to see a doctor.

This no-wait mindset is what spurred Georgia-based healthcare provider Tanner Health System to build a mobile app listing the wait times for its urgent care centers where consumers can walk in and receive medical attention. In fact, Tanner Health System got the idea for listing wait times from the Great Clips Inc. haircut app, which shows the wait times at its hair-cutting salons, says Kelly Meigs, director of marketing at Tanner Health System.

Tanner Health System has four urgent care centers, three of which are close to one another, Meigs says. With wait times listed in the app, a patient can see how long it would take for him to get in to see a doctor and either go to the urgent care center if the estimate is manageable, wait at home until the time decreases, or compare the time to another one of Tanner’s urgent care centers.

“It’s a way to promote the other urgent care centers so patients can access services faster,” Meigs says.

Many patients use an urgent care center when they aren’t sick enough to go to the emergency room, but want to see a doctor right away, Meigs says. She says many visit these facilities in the late evening or weekends when most primary care physicians’ offices are not open.

Urgent care facilities get especially busy during flu or allergy seasons when wait times can surge up to two hours, Meigs says. Plus, the number of patients using these walk-in clinics is increasing 20% each year at Tanner Health System, Meigs says. Thus, having wait times listed on a smartphone is beneficial for patients.

The mobile app launched in October of 2014, around the same time Tanner launched a mobile friendly website. More than 50% of the visits to the Tanner Health System website were on either a smartphone or tablet, which spurred the healthcare provider to update its site to responsive design. Responsive design allows a single website to adjust to the size of the screen the visitor is viewing.

Tanner employed mobile app builder MobileSmith to design the app and healthcare website builder Avid Design for the responsive site. The app took about two months to build and cost less than $15,000, Meigs says. Tanner Health also pays an annual hosting fee to MobileSmith of between $10,000 and $15,000, for maintenance and content updates, she says.

Avid Design first built an RSS Feed for Tanner Health’s website that displays the wait times at all four of the Tanner facilities. MobileSmith then integrated this feed into the app. A front desk staff member at the urgent care center inputs into the backend of the website what he believes is the wait time once an hour. The system will automatically email a reminder to the employee to update the wait time if he forgets to update it hourly.

Since the beginning of March this year, the Tanner Health System app amassed 4,600 app downloads and more than 22,000 app sessions, Meigs says. The most viewed pages in the app are the home page, the wait times and the maps to the urgent care locations, she says. While patients can also see wait times on the mobile site, it is faster for patients to look up wait times in the app, Meigs says.

The healthcare provider didn’t know what to expect app adoption to be like, since many of Tanner’s clients are older, Meigs says. However, Tanner is happy so far with the results, as most of the app users are return visitors and users are growing, Meigs says. Plus, since the health system started the myTanner Patient Portal a year ago, patients are more comfortable interacting with Tanner Health System digitally, she says. The portal is place on the Tanner website where patients can log in to view their test results, a summary of their health records and pay bills.

Tanner Health lets its patients know about the app via flyers in its 30 physician practices, direct mail, its magazine,and its Facebook page.

Tanner Health also is using the app to market some of the healthcare system’s events, however, it will only send one smartphone alert a quarter, Meigs says. “We don’t want to be too bothersome,” she says. “We push only things that have the broadest interest.”

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