Defective dashboard erred on ER wait times

A memo sent to staff has revealed longstanding flaws in the system that estimates wait times at Winnipeg emergency departments, which sometimes causes the projections to be lower than the actual wait times.

The memo, obtained by the Free Press, shows officials from Shared Health and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority reached out to staff in February to warn them wait time estimates were sometimes found to be “quite inaccurate.”

“As many of you know, the publicly facing waiting times boards are not always reflective of the actual number of patients in the department, nor have they always given wait times that prepare our patients for the wait that they will experience,” the memo said.

The regional health authority publishes estimated wait times for emergency departments and urgent-care centres online, and updates the figures throughout the day. The data includes the number of people waiting or being treated at each facility.

The memo warned inaccurate estimates can, in some cases, lead to “safety events” in which patients choose to leave one facility to be triaged at another because they expect a shorter wait. To combat that, health officials removed wait time displays from waiting rooms.

Health officials have spent months working with the vendor behind the estimates to improve accuracy. The memo said the vendor’s system used old data that “no longer represent the reality in 2025-2026” to predict wait times. A multi-year data set was recently updated to the end of 2024 to make the boards more accurate.

“We hope this will reduce the number of frustrating encounters based on misleading information,” it said.

On Monday, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said physicians flagged the inaccurate estimates last summer.

The health minister said data used to formulate wait time estimates were inadvertently “capped” — meaning patient numbers could only go up to a given figure, regardless of how many people were actually in an emergency department.

The memo notes this cap, which was active during late evenings and nights, has been removed.

“This was a historical practice — we’re talking eight, 10 years old — and that approach had never been changed,” Asagwara said, adding the work started immediately to fix the issue.

“We know it’s really, really important for Manitobans to have accurate information when they’re looking at wait times… You should be able to trust that information is accurate so you make the best decision for your family.”

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson was not surprised to learn about the problem.

“I have believed for a very long time that there has been an error in these dashboards,” Jackson said, adding she frequently fields complaints about inaccurate wait times.

She said misleading information can frustrate patients and cause them to lash out at nurses and other care providers.

“The front-line staff seem to be the people that get the brunt of that frustration from patients that are waiting, waiting, waiting for hours.”

Transparency and accuracy are critical to ensuring a safe and efficient health system, she said.

Dr. Stephenson Strobel, a health economist and emergency physician who has researched the impact of displaying wait time estimates in some Ontario facilities, described such estimates as a “double-edged sword.”

High wait times can sometime dissuade less acute patients from heading to the emergency room, encouraging them to seek treatment elsewhere and reducing overcrowding. However, if projected wait times become too high, even very sick patients may choose not to seek care, he said.

In some cases, there are administrative reasons to place caps on the number of patients that can be accounted for in wait time-prediction models — in part, to strike a balance between those two scenarios. Often, these caps lead to wait time estimates that are lower than reality, he said.

“I think providing accurate information to patients and allowing them to make decisions for themselves is probably better than not providing them information and letting them make decisions for themselves,” he said.

Doctors Manitoba, which speaks for physicians in the province, said the same.

“Doctors strive for accuracy in everything they do, and they would expect the information the health system shares with patients to be held to the same standard,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

A person familiar with Manitoba’s tracking system, who spoke on background because they were not authorized to discuss the subject, said accurate wait times are difficult to nail down.

The province shifted from an in-house model that showed current wait times in each facility to a prediction model run by a private company around 2016 or 2017, he said.

Both methods have shortcomings, but the prediction model is “more of a weather forecast for what’s to come, rather than just telling you what the temperature is right now,” he said.

”Prediction has become more challenging for two reasons. First, the pandemic led to major disruptions in how patients accessed care. You can see wait times improved during the early pandemic. Then, as the system recovered, wait times grew and are now consistently much longer than they were before the pandemic,” he said.

“These changing factors make a prediction model less reliable when the history it draw on no longer repeats itself.”

tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca