[yubrew]

haha, iamelgringo, you beat me to bring up these comments. let me add on a bit to what you've already said.

hospitals are not just run as businesses, but they also need to serve the public. as such, you also have ethical and social concerns. there are a several substantial problems with your idea:

-promotes inequality of care based on money. this will likely turn out to be a huge legal issue.

-the decision of something being life threatening should not be determined by patients, but by health professionals.

-substantial change to hospital behavior. the act of creating and incorporating reservations to the ER system will likely be a shock that hospital administrators will not appreciate. (just look at how long it took for doctors to move from beepers to PDA's and cell phones, and also look at the adoption of electronic medical records which is still less than 18% of all doctors) making hospital staff jump through new hoops will increase the resistance of using your technology.

please do not take these comments the wrong way. your idea could work, if you tweaked the business model around hospital constraints, and nothing specific is popping up right now. perhaps other areas where waiting in line is a pain that people will pay for?

[cstejerean]

Try to sell this service to government agencies where usually the wait times are ridiculous. Personally I would feel weird registering online for a visit to the ER. I'm either sick enough and I want to go there NOW or I'm not that sick and I can just see my regular physician when he has time.