Stanford says drive-through triage was effective

PALO ALTO, Calif. — An experiment at Stanford University last summer showed that a car can be an effective exam room, Stanford Hospital & Clinics announced last week.

To determine whether a drive-through medical clinic could be a quick way to screen patients during a pandemic like swine flu while preventing the spread of disease, Stanford recruited 38 American Red Cross volunteers on June 12 to act as patients with flu-like symptoms. They drove their cars through triage stations in a parking garage, and doctors took blood pressure readings, listened to breathing with stethoscopes and talked to patients about their symptoms through car windows.

Ultimately, the experiment showed that "a drive-through medical clinic is not only a feasible model, but may be a preferred type of alternative care center," Dr. Eric Weiss said in a statement. "It can expedite and facilitate seeing large numbers of patients while mitigating the spread of infectious diseases by providing a social distancing mechanism."

Instead of the 90 minutes it usually takes to examine a patient at a hospital, the car examinations took an average of 26 minutes, according to a report Weiss helped author, which was published last Wednesday in the online Annals of Emergency Medicine.

"You don't have delays inherent in having to turn over a fixed number of rooms, waiting for patients to be discharged, having to change linens," Weiss said in the statement.

Weiss and his colleagues at Stanford first began discussing the possibility of drive-through medical clinics in 2004, after doctors elsewhere faced an outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

"Crowded emergency department waiting rooms were a major accelerator of SARS in Toronto," Weiss said in the statement. "We were talking about how we were going to expand our waiting room, and we came up with the idea, 'Why don't we just not have patients in the waiting room? Why don't we have physicians see them while they wait in their cars?"'

The Santa Clara County, Calif., Public Health Department has given Stanford a grant to support development of the drive-through medical clinic approach. Stanford doctors have also developed a "playbook" that other hospitals can use to help set up their own drive-through clinics, according to the statement.