An independent, public-data tool for Ontario patients.

Our mission

Every year, millions of Ontarians wait for a procedure without ever being told that another hospital nearby could see them sooner. The data exists — it's just buried in PDFs, dashboards, and government portals.

MedWait's mission is to make that data legible. We don't sell ads to hospitals, we don't require an account, and we don't collect personal health information. We just take the public numbers, rank them, and explain what they mean.

Methodology

Wait-time figures for surgeries and MRI/CT represent the 90th-percentile wait — the number of days within which 9 out of 10 patients had their procedure. They come from Ontario Health's public wait-times reporting, hospital by hospital, updated monthly. Breast screening (OBSP) sites publish a single reported wait for a routine screening appointment, and private-clinic numbers are clinic-reported. Each wait is labelled accordingly in the facility details card.

Safety figures are hospital-acquired C. difficile, MRSA, and VRE rates per 1,000 patient bed-days, from Ontario Health's patient-safety public reporting. These are closely tracked indicator infections — no hospital publishes a total infection rate, so we don't show one. Sepsis (per 1,000 discharges) and 30-day readmission come from CIHI's all-patients indicators, risk-adjusted so hospitals treating sicker patients are compared fairly. Where a hospital's number isn't published, we display "No data" rather than imputing a value.

An automated pipeline checks for new data weekly and matches hospital names across sources. The reporting period of the data you're seeing is shown on every results table, and full source links are on the Data sources page.

Press

For media enquiries, interview requests, or to be added to our press list, please email press@medwait.ca.

A short factsheet about MedWait, our data sources, and our funding model is available on request.