Wait times remain stubbornly long in hospital emergency rooms
Each year, there are well over 100 million hospital emergency department visits in the U.S. In 2017, there were about 139 million, or 43 visits for every 100 Americans.
While wait times have declined in the last decade – now averaging about 40 minutes – they remain stubbornly long. Millions of patients still wait at least two hours to see a provider – 7 million did in 2017 – and that is no guarantee they won’t have to wait even longer for treatment. In California, hundreds of thousands of patients that same year left after getting an emergency department bed but before their care was complete.
How long people have to wait can have a lot to do with the outcome of those visits, sometimes with serious consequences that include longer hospital stays, increased medical errors and higher death...