The Hidden Cost of "Wait and See"
Chief Medical Officer Dr. Scott Braunstein investigate a common bad habit: putting off healthcare with the hope that non-urgent symptoms will resolve on their own.
You probably know the feeling: a headache that lingers a little too long or stomach trouble that comes and goes. You rationalize it, almost without thinking: It's probably nothing. I'll give it a few days. For many of us, busy schedules and the hassle of healthcare—the costs, the long waits, the risk of a crowded ER—outweigh non-urgent symptoms. We hope they’ll resolve on their own, and sometimes they do. But sometimes they don't.
In the traditional emergency room, I often encountered patients whose non-urgent symptoms didn’t resolve with time. They came to us with ongoing headaches that were caused by hypertension, cardiac arrhythmias they thought were just stress, or low-grade infections that had suddenly gotten scary. The problem was almost the same one they'd noticed weeks earlier, only now it was more challenging to treat, and the outcome far less certain.
Over my 20+ years of practicing emergency medicine, these experiences taught me that many serious health conditions could be prevented if patients got care sooner instead of taking the “wait and see” approach to their health.
Unfortunately, this mistake is growing more common, not less.
A Rational Response to a Broken System
The decision to take the “wait and see” approach isn’t a character flaw. The problem is the American healthcare system, which makes seeking and receiving primary and proactive care genuinely difficult. Primary care wait times stretch into weeks, and emergency departments—the only branch of the system that never closes—are overextended. For the more than 30% of American adults who report having no usual source of care (the highest level in a decade), there's no trusted clinician to call when something just feels off.
For these people, the choice becomes to either ignore it or spend hours in an ER waiting room. So they Google, take their best guess, and, too often, decide to wait and see.
Unfortunately, self-triage like this is clinically unreliable. A landmark study in the BMJ found that online symptom checkers provided appropriate guidance in only 57% of standardized evaluations and performed significantly worse for non-emergent conditions where self-care was appropriate. Research shows that patients routinely misjudge urgency in both directions: they dismiss warning signs that warrant immediate evaluation, or they show up to emergency departments with conditions that don’t belong there. Neither outcome is optimal.
The data on what delayed care actually costs is unambiguous. In a major systematic review from 2023, the European Heart Journal found that pandemic-related delays in cardiovascular care led to significant decreases in hospital admissions for ischemic heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and heart failure, while mortality rates rose substantially. A 2020 systematic review and meta-analysis from the BMJ examining cancer treatments across seven cancer types (bladder, breast, colon, rectum, lung, cervix, and head and neck) found that each four-week delay in treatment was associated with measurably higher mortality.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that early-stage conditions that are highly treatable can become late-stage conditions that are not. What began as avoidance can easily compound into something far more serious, and far more expensive.
Removing the Reasons to "Wait and See"
What I've seen in my career—and what drives the model we've built at Sollis—is that the barriers to timely care are largely structural, not personal. When access is immediate, when a physician who knows your history is available at any hour, and when the inconvenience and uncertainty of the ER both disappear, patients behave differently. They reach out sooner. They catch things earlier.. Their outcomes are better.
That's not a hypothesis. It's what happens when you remove the reasons people delay seeking care.
The "wait and see" instinct is understandable. But it carries a cost that rarely shows up until it's higher than it needed to be.
*Sources from the Milbank Memorial Fund, the BMJ, the American Heart Association, the AJMC, and the European Heart Journal.