The average hospital emergency department (ED) patient in the United States waits more than an hour and half to be taken to his or her room and 2.25 hours before being discharged. Patients who arrive at EDs with broken bones wait a painful 54 minutes, on average, before receiving any pain medication. And worryingly, the number of patients who leave EDs without being seen has almost doubled in recent years.
To Reduce Emergency Room Wait Times, Tie Them to Payments
The average hospital emergency department (ED) patient in the United States waits more than an hour and half to be taken to his or her room and 2.25 hours before being discharged. Patients who arrive at EDs with broken bones wait a painful 54 minutes, on average, before receiving any pain medication. And worryingly, the number of patients who leave EDs without being seen has almost doubled in recent years. Despite the wide publicity excessive ED waiting time has attracted, this problem has persisted for a long time. In our latest research with Ozlem Yildiz of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, which employed a mathematical model, we came up with a new way to tackle the waiting time problem in EDs: tie a portion of payments to the national (risk-adjusted) average waiting time of ED patients with similar conditions.